UNCOVERING THE LAYERS missing , incomplete , or do not work as expected . Features are modularised and require additional purchases . The user interfaces are outdated and hard to use . The performance is slow . They cannot scale to accommodate the number of devices in modern data centres . The support is terrible .
We listened to these pain points and wanted to do something about them . That ’ s when second-generation DCIM was created .
What sets second-generation DCIM apart ?
While legacy DCIM tools are adequate for some of the most common daily tasks faced by today ’ s data centre managers and operators , second-generation DCIM improves on its first-generation counterpart with enhanced versions of the monitoring and operations features in legacy DCIM tools as well as new functionality for modern data centre environments .
Second-generation DCIM deploys in half the time of first-generation tools and requires significantly fewer resources for a fast return on investment .
It ’ s extremely easy to use with an elegant , intuitive design that simplifies a data centre manager ’ s most common tasks .
It provides zero-configuration analytics in which pre-built dashboards , charts , reports and visual analytics for the most important data centre KPIs are available out of the box . Shared dashboards and team views enable data-driven collaboration and smarter decision-making .
Second-generation DCIM comes with free APIs and connectors that make it easy to drive automation via integration with other tools .
It offers extreme scalability that can handle millions of assets , billions of data points per day and thousands of users .
Other key pillars of second-generation DCIM are that it offers full suite of capabilities for complete data centre management , it is vendor-agnostic and works with virtually all third-party meters , sensors and software , and it leverages AI and Machine Learning capabilities to help optimise the data centre .
What tools can be integrated with second-generation DCIM ?
Second-generation DCIM features free APIs and customer-configurable connectors that enable integration with most other tools that have the appropriate APIs . This automation via integration eliminates double entry and reduces manual effort .
For example , integration with VMware helps data centre managers easily identify and track server resources that support VMware virtual machines .
Integration with CMDBs such as ServiceNow , BMC Remedy , Ivanti / Cherwell and even homegrown systems is also popular . Customers can exchange asset information between their DCIM tool and nearly any application that exposes their REST APIs . In many cases , this integration can become operational within an hour .
An exciting new type of integration is with ticketing systems . If an organisation already has a ticketing application such as Jira or ServiceNow that they use to track their data centre changes and incidents ,
they can now push those automatically to their DCIM to initiate the workflow process . The tickets can also be automatically updated from their DCIM . This drives automation like automatically closing the ticket once the work is completed .
Leading data centre professionals are also utilising DevOps tools like Jenkins and Chef to integrate their DCIM software with applications like Jira , Slack and Splunk . They are automating everything from provisioning and orchestration to parts management to back-office processing . The possibilities are endless .
How do you quantify the RoI of second-generation DCIM ?
The most modern data centre managers in the world use second-generation DCIM to maintain uptime , increase the efficiency of capacity utilisation and improve the productivity of people . There are many ways to measure the Return-on- Investment ( RoI ) that they are seeing .
With their first-generation DCIM tool , Paddy Power Betfair had 5 – 10 users . After they switched to secondgeneration DCIM with greater reporting capabilities and data democratisation , colleagues outside of the data centre team wanted access to their system . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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