EXPERT OPINION
Herman Chan, President at
Sunbird Software
down for more granular cabinet-level
metrics. Advanced warning of issues
such as hot spot formation, power
capacity limitations, and loss of
redundancy allows you to take action
to prevent downtime. DCIM software
combined with remote power
control on intelligent rack PDUs lets
you switch devices on or off or power
cycle them without the need for an
on-site technician to reboot servers
and restore them to service.
• Remotely manage all assets and
connections across the entire
data centre deployment. As data
centres become more complex
and distributed, more data centre
managers are tasked to remotely
manage multiple sites and business
applications. In a modern data
centre environment, maintaining an
accurate inventory of all your assets
across all sites requires a tool that
provides real-time views of all your
physical data centre infrastructure.
DCIM provides business intelligence
and analytics on metrics such as
asset count by location, hosts
per application and asset cost by
location which helps you understand
which applications require the
most resources and where you can
increase efficiency. DCIM also lets
you easily understand how assets
are physically connected via visual
circuit traces to help you avoid
overloaded circuits, decrease
latency, perform impact analysis and
quickly troubleshoot connections to
reduce downtime.
• Improve collaboration and
productivity of remote workers.
With most data centre employees
now working from home, it’s more
important than ever for data centre
teams to break down organisational
silos and share a single source
of truth via common views of
dashboards and reports that are
updated and visible in real time.
A modern, second-generation
DCIM solution will enable datadriven
collaboration of remote
workers with business intelligence
dashboards that can be created,
edited and securely shared with
respect to granular, role-based
access controls. You can manage
consistent KPIs across your
functional teams with preconfigured
widgets and reports for every
data centre scenario. Categorise
all assets in your data centre and
easily save and share asset and site
views with the various groups in
your organisation, whether server,
network, storage or infrastructure
teams, ensuring a common
approach and process for remote
management of all equipment.
• Ensure physical security of data
centres. DCIM software has user
reporting, audit logs, physical
cabinet lock management and
surveillance feeds to allow you
to monitor and manage who has
access to different areas of your
data centre. You can even remotely
unlock cabinet doors for remote
hands to service equipment while
keeping an eye on them with remote
in-rack camera feeds.
The ‘new normal’ may present a unique
set of challenges, but the objectives
remain the same: improve uptime,
utilisation and productivity. Now more
than ever, data centre professionals
need a complete remote data centre
management toolkit with DCIM to
bridge information across organisational
domains including operations, facilities
and IT, and have the information they
need to manage all physical, virtual and
logical data centre assets; quickly plan
and provision new equipment; accurately
make changes as needed; improve data
centre design; increase operational
efficiency and confidently plan capacity
for future growth while increasing
utilisation of existing assets. ◊
DATA CENTRE
PROFESSIONALS
NEED A COMPLETE
REMOTE
DATA CENTRE
MANAGEMENT
TOOLKIT WITH
DCIM TO BRIDGE
INFORMATION
ACROSS
ORGANISATIONAL
DOMAINS.
42 Issue 18
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