Robert Neave, Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Product Management, Nlyte Software spoke with RIQ about the need for a DCIM and choosing the right DCIM. He explains how DCIMs support “Green IT” initiatives and help in reducing the carbon footprint. As the CTO and VP, he is responsible for developing new technology, and, setting and driving product strategy.
How does Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) affect the productivity and efficiency of IT assets of a company? What are the other business impact areas of DCIM?
Enterprises that deploy DCIM software immediately realize an increase in staff efficiency supporting the IT assets as well as the ability to optimize and manage the physical data center infrastructure. Efficiency gains are also realized due to DCIM’s power optimization abilities and the cost reduction impact that greatly improves business operations.
In some cases, DCIM’s value is also apparent because IT assets are identified and retired, freeing up rack space and deferring the need for expansion or even the purchase of a new facility.
There are various models of data centers– the physical on-premises data centers, cloud storage data centers, and a hybrid model with both, physical and cloud storage data centers. What are the key aspects a CTO should keep in mind when choosing a data center model?
Companies must determine what type of infrastructure is right for their specific business needs.
The CTO should review a number of critical features when selecting which data center model would be the best option, including:
- The speed and types of applications that will run on the system.
- Overall costs associated with each option.
- What type of applications are already on the system.
- How secure the applications are and if changes need to be made.
- How much control they want to have over IT assets.
In addition, there is the latency consideration. For example, a financial institution needs to weigh this factor carefully, especially when it comes to the physical location of IT assets. If assets are too far away, latency is increased and the prospect of losing millions of dollars is introduced with every extra millisecond it takes for a financial transaction to be completed.
**More importantly, carefully considering the workload will help the CTO determine the best-fit data center model**. Workloads can be broken into several categories such as transactional and content-oriented workloads. Some apps that are running only temporarily, let’s say only during the holidays, could run on public cloud for instance, others can be contained in-house or on a private cloud.
The bottomline: selecting the best data center model will depend on the company’s specific needs and where the IT assets are currently deployed.
What are the physical or environmental factors that are important to DCIM which maybe easily overlooked by a company – for example overheating or humidity?
Companies must look at what they are measuring and what resources they are monitoring – from power to temperature to humidity. These measurements must be in real-time and if they’re looking at trends, they must have real-time monitoring tools to uncover macro-trends.
Let’s say a company is only monitoring threshold trends for breaches. By only waiting for a breach moment, they may be rapidly moving towards an outage and never realize it. Without the added DCIM visibility, this potential outage is easy to miss. For example, they might’ve seen a spike that occurred a month ago, it’s not over the threshold set, but it’s doubling and may result in a major risk or failure. With a DCIM solution deployed, all these micro-trends are monitored in real-time so facility and IT personnel can mitigate the risks by being alerted to potential disasters–before they occur and still in the “symptom state.”
How can DCIM ensure the optimal use of energy throughout the organization’s IT assets?
A DCIM solution can help organizations save up to 25% in energy and power consumption – just simply by monitoring and implementing corrections, such as optimizing temperature.
With a contingency plan in place, DCIM allows organizations to ensure power consistency. We all know organizations can’t afford to tarnish their brand and image, costly downtime that results in millions of dollars in lost revenue equates to bad press, customer loss and revenue decline.
With a DCIM power failure simulation, organizations can monitor and analyze the power chain and prevent outages from occurring and more importantly-determine and pinpoint power vulnerabilities. DCIM also allows for operators to confidently raise temperatures since they’re monitoring the isles in real-time.
Data is the currency of the digital age. Storage and security of data is a primary concern for any organization. In this context, how does DCIM help in ensuring the safety of data? Is a DCIM software susceptible to cyberattacks?
Any organization reviewing a DCIM solution should make sure that the vendor is certified by a third party. This type of validation ensures the vendor provides a commitment to best-security development practices to protect critical data center information.
**With a DCIM solution, organizations have full visibility into their physical assets and can monitor what applications and virtual data is running on each system**. There is a hierarchy of systems, certain systems are more critical, so these should be stored in a secure space to have complete visibility and control of the data.
How should a CTO or CIO work collaboratively with functional business leaders to leverage effective DCIM?
CTOs and CIOs should work closely with their infrastructure and business leaders to determine specific needs, including visibility into critical systems as well as what data is needed when resources are being modified. For instance, a financial institution must be aware of what applications are running on their systems and if any of the warranties are due to expire soon. Organizations must have full knowledge of their assets at all times – not only during audits.
A DCIM solution – that is fully optimized – can offer all this visibility and more.
With the introduction of more and more “smart” devices, IoT is fast becoming a reality. Where does DCIM fit in with IoT, Machine Learning and AI?
Certainly, the advances in smart devices are pushing for highly-optimized data centers and underscore the irreversible need for a “Cognitive DCIM.”
The integration of AI and Machine Learning is critical and enables operators to not only gather data, but to make the right business decisions based on the intelligent analysis of data collected.
The level of sophistication needed to optimize today’s modern data center facilities must ensure application performance, as well as the ability to collect, harness and understand a tremendous amount of information from the facilities and IT stack. The IT industry needs intuitive tools to rapidly collect and analyze information to better understand how to manage workloads and their impact on critical-facilities infrastructure.
How can companies ensure that they are buying not only a high performing DCIM software but also a cost-effective one? What are the key metrics for success?
Any organization evaluating a DCIM vendor must request ROIs and savings as well as real-world use cases of clients showing tangible results. Organizations should also consider the potential ROIs and savings they will gain by deploying a DCIM solution – from reduction in resources, power, cooling, physical assets, deferring buying and increasing employee efficiency. Anyone whose jobs depends on the information coming from these IT assets will be empowered by a DCIM solution and have visibility into real-time critical information needed to make best business decisions. Manual tasks and spreadsheets should not be part of today’s data center management environment.
How does DCIM help in the cause of “Green IT”?
By deploying a DCIM solution organizations immediately enjoy a reduction in their power and energy consumption, as well as physical asset footprint – which in turn helps reduce carbon emissions and result in green IT practices.
What’s coming up that you’re excited about in two areas: in the market in general—perhaps a trend or tool; and within Nlyte Software—any new features or upcoming innovations?
According to Gartner Research, there will be 26 billion “things” connected to the Internet by 2020. Cisco’s prediction is closer to 50 billion.
The onslaught of data and increasing demand for computing infrastructure – the growth in IoT, AR, Machine Learning as well as public and private cloud is driving increased need for tools that can enable overall data center management and connected applications, from virtual to physical infrastructure, and integrating all of them for easy access and visibility. Machine Learning is the first steps for managing all these assets.
At Nlyte we are very excited to announce the early July general availability of Nlyte Machine Learning DCIM solution – and we are working to introduce products in 2019 that will help further optimize the modern computing infrastructure needs.
About Nlyte Software:
Nlyte Software was formed in 2004 by data center managers driven to find a better way to manage the complexity of data center resources, assets and staff in order to reduce costs and mitigate risk. Today, over 14 years later, Nlyte Software is delivering it’s 10th generation of products to hundreds of customers worldwide, based on market and customer feedback. In 2014, Gartner initiated the DCIM Magic Quadrant for Data Center Infrastructure Management Tools and has recognized Nlyte as a leader for three years running.