Data centers are undergoing tremendous changes with the fastpaced needs of enterprises in the IoT age. Aniket Patange, Director Datacenter Lifecycle Services, Schneider Electric gives over-view of how DCIM tools can be leveraged to maximize operational efficiency and security to Jasmine Desai.
How is DCIM tool becoming critical for efficient functioning of data centers?
As more and more data centers in India metamorphose into advanced, intelligent and efficient hubs for business apps, DCIM assumes great significance in bringing IT and facilities together. The goal of a DCIM initiative is to provide administrators with a holistic view of a data center’s performance so that energy, equipment and floor space are used as efficiently as possible. DCIM
tools are very critical especially in growing digital scenarios .Currently, all users use written logs, which helps in monitoring equipment in realtime although it is local. They have written logs which captures all critical operational parameters of the devices and equipment every one hour. This is repeated frequently so that they have a big database. Based on this they can make informed decision. However, this process is not automated which creates its own challenges. Firstly, one has to depend on the skills of the person who is handling the data center. To overcome this, we have a suite of DCIM software Stuxurware. This enables to automate operations and generate lots of statistical data which can be used for various purposes. For example, they can review the trends, view the performance of the equipment, make statistical analysis of performance of equipment by hourly basis and predict its failure.
Which are different consumption models for DCIM?
Our DCIM tool can be consumed on-premise or through a service model where we offer customers periodic services in different ways. One model in services is that our team is stationed at the customer site. Second model is where all devices at the customer’s data center is connected to our services bureau in Bangalore wherein we get live feed from these devices and their performance, and give accordingly timely feedback to operations team at the customer’s site. In terms of security, DCIM is a preventative tool which can detect potential threats and instantly detect weird patterns in devices. Third model is wherein we make periodic visits to customer’s site where we carry the software tool and with the data we gather and over 23 day sessions we have with the customers we give them inputs based on it.
What is Stuxurware’s differentiation point?
There are three areas in data center that we have to look at, i.e. power, cooling and space. There has to be optimization around all three of them to bring in high level of efficiency. From differentiation perspective, our focus is on capacity of the loading and the capacity available in the data center. Most facilities are over a decade old and are build based on the data center designs
available then. These are mostly under utilised. We map energy consumption of every rack. This information is useful to operations team to use it to charge back the respective teams as per the consumption. Another important feature is that of creating ‘what if?” simulations. For every IT load that enters into the datacenter one needs to find out if there is adequate power, cooling and space in the rack and if the rack can take that load. So this creates different kinds of situation or simulates them to know the optimal usage of that IT load on the power, cooling and space. Typically, this is done manually by experience and judgment by users.
How can DCIM tools be leveraged in a data center in the IoT era?
In the age of IoT, we are able to connect to all devices of customers across geographies through our services bureau. We have created a special M2M platform where devices directly communicate with our service bureau. The data which comes in is very raw data. We use DCIM tools extensively to do first level cleaning and analysis of data and then use different modules in
the tool to populate important reserves. As and when we analyse the data and populate the reserves, we charge the customer accordingly. Since this tool is vendor agnostic it can integrate several operating instructions coming out of several softwares and devices, aggregates it and uses it accordingly. The tool can talk to the device independently and even through the BMS which at
the customer location.
The adoption rate in America and Europe is very fast. However, in India there are lot of legacy infrastructure operated without efficient tools. We have been having conversations with our users on benefits of using DCIM tools with ROI calculators. The most important business impact of DCIM tool would be cost reduction. Presently, most of the traction is in IT/ITES, BFSI and
Telcos. One the benefits our customers consistently experience is minimizing the risk of the operations. Due to DCIM tool they are less likely to make mistakes, due to this the downtime associated with that comes down drastically.
jasmine.desai@expressindia.com