The complex Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) market is set to rise in the coming year. Peter Sharples, Senior Director, Solution Sales, Energy and Sustainability, APJ, CA Technologies, explains the intricacies of DCIM market to Jasmine Desai.
Why is the demand for DCIM products muted in the market? Is there lack of awareness about the benefits that can can come from DCIMs?
For last three years, the DCIM space is witnessing an uptake and currently there are over 47 acknowledged providers of DCIM solutions. The broad range of solution capability leads to misunderstanding of what a DCIM solution is. This trend is changing and according to Gartner, within APJ 40% of enterprises are considering DCIM purchases this year. As a result, the DCIM market is expected to grow by 13% in 2015. Market demand is being largely driven by two critical events – firstly clients that have experienced impact on their critical systems due to power outages, and secondly clients that are undergoing data centre expansion or reconfiguration activities.
How do you demonstrate DCIM? value in a simple way?
The value for a DCIM product is linked to the business model being employed by our clients. For example, a co-location provider will look to use DCIM as a revenue generation vehicle to secure and retain clients and provide value-added services. For larger enterprises, application availability will be the key focus. For clients that want to expand, the ability to centrally monitor and manage remote data centres will be at the fore-front of their thinking. The key is understanding the clients business and how DCIM solution can improve value for them.
DCIM implementation requires lot of changes. So how do you simplify DCIM implementation for your customers?
CA Technologies takes a completely hardware independent view of the market. So from a client side, typically we make only the hardware modifications that drive value. The largest degree of change that we see for a DCIM solution are process and culture related. Typically clients need to re-examine their Change, Asset and Incident Management processes as part of a DCIM deployment to gain maximum benefit. From a cultural level, we often see IT and Facilities working together and collaborating on shared processes and tools for the first time.
Can you elaborate on the visualisation feature in your DCIM product?
Visualisation is one of the marquee features of most DCIM solutions. The ability to interact in 3-D, drag and drop infrastructure and examine down to port-level IT equipment that is located around the world is a great efficiency enabler for data centre operators. Over-laying this, analysis of temperature and humidity creates a near-real time understanding of the temperature distribution. Lets say you have created a hot spot in the data centre through configuration changes, or you are running the data centre too cold and over-spending on power! These issues can be quickly analysed and acted upon. The temperature data can be played back over time to show the historic changes and movement of temperature around the data centre as infrastructure is placed or moved. Also predictive analytics allows analysis of what-if impact on temperature for proposed infrastructure placement.
In converged infrastructure offering, how are you different from your competitors when it comes to next-gen analytics and modules?
Converged infrastructure looks at the efficiency and optimisation of data centres beyond PUE measurement. CA Technologies capability allows our clients to examine the compute layer of resource as a function of data centre efficiency we call this the resource Score For example, a client is running a data centre at a PUE of 1.6 yet only has a server utilisation of 12%, suddenly what appeared to be a very efficiently run data centre from an energy perspective, is now very inefficient from a utilisation point of view. The combination of this intelligence is a major game-changer for business in terms of asset utilisation, predictive capacity and performance optimisation.
