Our recent DCIM implementations provide an insight to actual use pattern with enterprise DCIM customers in the South Asia region. While analyst reports, mostly focused on the North American and Western Europe markets, suggest Energy Efficiency, Capacity Planning and Compliance considerations as foremost reasons for DCIM deployment, here’s our observations:
- While 80% of our enterprise data center customers have licensed for GFS Crane DCIM full suite, the principal (but not only) reason for their deployment was to prevent a data center outage.
- To prevent this outage, customers needed instant monitoring and getting alerts from all critical infrastructures.
- If customer had a BMS, DCIM had to integrate with that.
- If customer did not have a BMS, then DCIM had to integrate directly with the devices, and specifically with those they perceived as the MOST critical, or the weakest link in the chain.
- The other DCIM functions in order of importance were: management dashboards with KPIs, data center visualization, asset and change management (with workflow approvals and audit trails) and capacity planning.
The above use patterns are for enterprise DCIM, as against DCIM in multi-tenant data centers who of course have additional reasons for DCIM deployment like automating customer on-boarding process, capacity planning and power/space inventory management, energy billing and offering customer portals for self-service.
Most enterprise data centers in India are less than 50 Racks and a large proportion do not have BMS or instrumentation for monitoring of physical infrastructure. They rely on periodic manual monitoring taking readings from device consoles, room thermometers and hand-held power meters. The inadequacy of this archaic approach is obvious to all. Hence the options are BMS, DCIM or a combination of both, latter two when customers are looking beyond monitoring and sending alerts.
The weakest link with one customer, operating in a region with daily twelve-hour power outages, were DG sets and fuel supply. Hence, GFS Crane DCIM had to offer a comprehensive fuel automation system including 24×7 hour monitoring of DG sets and fuel tanks and controlling fuel levels in the tanks.
With a High Performance Computing customer, paranoid about poor power quality or extended power outage damaging expensive equipment, GFS Crane DCIM provided extensive alerts as well as analytics, not just on individual UPS devices, but also on banks of them with DR policies defined within the DCIM. Passive alerts were converted to actionable instructions for preventing an application outage, and quickly isolating any expensive equipment from such power related incidents. Of course, both these customers are also benefiting from GFS Crane DCIM’s comprehensive asset & change management, capacity planning, power and environment management capabilities across both physical as well as IT infrastructure – the latter with Intel Data Center Manager.
I take this opportunity to wish all our customers, partners and visitors to our web site a Very Happy & Prosperous New Year.