• • • EDITOR’S CHOICE • • •
Sustainability, reliability, efficiency: The changing face of data centre software
When Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) first appeared, it attracted great interest from analysts and end-users, many of whom expected that it would become commonplace, and completely indispensable to the demands of a growing data centre industry, said Nick Ewing, managing director of EfficiencyIT
A
s such, the hype cycle accelerated, with analysts such as Gartner touting it as the next significant technology and vendor
business opportunity to disrupt our industry. But as is often the case with any emerging technology, the reality of how it impacts the market can differ from the predictions made during its “hype stage.” Factors expected to drive DCIM adoption
included the ability to drive streamline operational efficiency, to help end-users monitor and reduce energy consumption and to maximise reliability – all while providing a tangible return on investment (ROI) and the ability to manage large, disaggregated IT portfolios with ease. Fast forward and the reality of the business opportunity was, well, a little different. While DCIM proved a raging success for some data centre managers, it failed to meet the expectations of others, and where some found major benefits others felt it was a wasted investment. More recently, the market has recently
experienced some retrenchment and consolidation. Last autumn, for example, Vertiv, whose Aperture asset management software was once one of the most widely adopted DCIM products, announced it was discontinuing its flagship Trellis platform. While rival DCIM vendor Nlyte was acquired by Carrier, a specialist in cooling equipment. This didn’t help to build confidence in the
capabilities of DCIM and the perception that leading platforms were disappearing from the market, with support for existing Trellis contracts ending in 2023, has left many data centre stakeholders bewildered. Could it be, in fact, that DCIM has become an overblown luxury that most organisations can’t afford or don’t need? As is always the case, the truth may be a little different…
Changing the perception
of DCIM Luckily for the end-users realising the benefits of DCIM, investments being made in user experience, data science, machine learning and in remote monitoring have begun to change its perception. And while it is undoubtedly true that many data
centre operators see its key strengths primarily in monitoring and management, the reality is that it became invaluable during the pandemic,
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especially where accessibility, visibility and continuity were fundamental challenges for our industry’s key workers. Reliability was, and is, the name of the game,
and DCIM platforms offering simple installation, intuitive ease of use and real-time data-driven insights, certainly saw increased adoption among our end-users. Even the 2021 Uptime Institute annual data centre survey revealed that 76% of operators felt their most recent downtime incident was preventable with better management, processes or configuration. Concerns surrounding environmental impact,
sustainability and energy efficiency have also grown in line with the changing end-user demands, especially within the colocation space. A Schneider Electric report with 451 Research revealed 97% of customers globally were demanding contractual commitments to sustainability. Monitoring, measurement and management are of course critical to an organisations sustainability efforts, positioning software, again, as an invaluable tool. However, the grand expectations that DCIM alone would spearhead major efforts throughout the industry to improve energy efficiency and sustainability have yet to be realised. Implementation, you see, still remains key –
understanding the business case, helping the customer to deploy the software, ensuring that all assets are monitored correctly while benchmarking their performance is essential work. Regardless of how important a task it may be, for many legacy operators it is no small feat, and with a burgeoning skills gap, the ability to find the right team for the job can often leave organisations helpless. There’s also the procurement cycle to address,
which requires multiple stakeholders. The responsibility for managing data centre infrastructure, even those typically addressed via DCIM tools, sits between IT, facilities and M&E departments – often with different objectives and chains of command. Finding the right person to sign-off on a new DCIM project, or even identifying the right group of people to first agree to its use, was once upon a time, a challenge. Luckily the business case is changing, and while the first versions of DCIM required considerable time and effort in terms of customisation, the
newer, or next-generation versions, can simplify the process significantly, bringing siloed teams together.
A new outlook Nowadays there remains a pressing need for tools to manage the various functions of a data centre efficiently. The real capabilities of DCIM, especially the recent versions deployed over the cloud, such as Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT, allow businesses of all scale to identify what their assets are, where they’re located, and how well they are performing. Further, they can proactively identify any status or security issues that need to be addressed, or any gaping holes in the infrastructure, so to speak. Further, any company that subscribes to ISO
27001, the global standard for IT security, must be able to track its assets and the people who have access and control to those assets. As such, cloud-based DCIM deployments can offer major benefits and allow distributed assets to be monitored and managed at relatively low cost. Another critical concern is minimising
downtime. Here, a reliable and vendor-agnostic DCIM platform can provide insights into all key power paths, especially if they comprise equipment from multiple manufacturers. The ability to track dependencies, to minimise potential risks to a mission-critical environment from a single piece of equipment, such as a Power Distribution Unit (PDU), uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or a cooling system, can be identified and potential outages mitigated. It also remains essential for DCIM software to
interact with legacy systems, facilities management suites, IT and network management software. This is best achieved through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow high-level information exchanges between disparate tools. Some analysts have opined that a particular weakness of Vertiv’s soon to be discontinued Trellis platform was its dependence on Oracle Fusion application development tools, which tended to limit its attractiveness to customers outside of Oracle’s environment. The fact remains, however, that in a world full of distributed data centres, interoperability is essential for all management tools.
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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