DCIM Yields Return on Investment

By: Michael Potts

As with any investment in the data center, the question of the return on the investment should be raised before purchasing a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution. In the APC white paper, “How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs,” the authors highlight the savings from a DCIM solution saying, “The deployment of modern planning tools can result in hundreds of man-hours saved per year and thousands of dollars saved in averted downtime costs.”

DCIM will not transform your data center overnight, but it will begin the process. While it isn’t necessary to reach the full level of maturity before seeing benefits, the areas of benefit are significant and can bring results in the short-term. The three primary methods in which DCIM provides ROI are:

• Improved Energy Efficiency
• Improved Availability
• Improved Manageability

DCIM LEADS TO IMPROVED ENERGY EFFICIENCY

In his blog, Dan Fry gets right to the heart of DCIM’s role in improving energy efficiency when he says, “To improve energy efficiency inside the data center, IT executives need comprehensive information, not isolated data. They need to be able to ‘see’ the problem in order to manage and correct it because, as we all know, you can’t manage what you don’t understand.”

The information provided by DCIM can help data center managers in reducing energy consumption:

MATCHING SUPPLY WITH DEMAND

Oversizing is one of the biggest roadblocks to energy efficiency in the data center. In an APC survey of data center utilization, only 20 percent of respondents had a utilization of 60 percent or more, while 50 percent had a utilization of 30 percent or less. One of the primary factors for oversizing is the lack of power and cooling data to help make informed decisions on the amount of infrastructure required. DCIM solutions can provide information on both demand and supply to allow you to “right-size” the infrastructure, reducing overall energy costs by as much as 30 percent.

IDENTIFYING UNDER-UTILIZED SERVERS

As many as 10 percent of servers are estimated to be “ghost servers,” servers which are running no applications, yet still consume 70 percent or more of the resources of a fully-utilized server. DCIM solutions can help to find these under-utilized servers Which could be decommissioned, re-purposed or consolidated as well as servers which do not have power management functionality enabled, reducing IT energy usage as well as delaying the purchase of additional servers.

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF INFRASTRUCTURE CHANGES

DCIM tools can measure energy efficiency metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) and Corporate Average Datacenter Efficiency (CADE). These metrics serve to focus attention on increasing the energy efficiency of data centers and to measure the results of changes to the infrastructure. In the white paper “Green Grid Data Center Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DCiE,” the authors lay out the case for the introduction of metrics to measure energy efficiency in the data center. The Green Grid believes that several metrics can help IT organizations better understand and improve the energy efficiency of their existing data centers as well as help them make smarter decisions on new data center deployments. In addition, these metrics provide a dependable way to measure their results against comparable IT organizations.

IMPROVED AVAILABILITY

DCIM solutions can improve availability in the following areas:

Understanding the Relationship Between Devices
A DCIM solution can help to answer questions such as “What systems will be impacted if I take the UPS down for maintenance?” It does this by understanding the relationship between devices, including the ability to track power and network chains. This information can be used to identify single points of failure and reduce downtime due to both planned and unplanned events.

Improved Change Management
When investigating an issue, examination of the asset’s change log allows problem managers to recommend a fix over 80 percent of the time, with a first fix rate of over 90 percent. This reduces the mean time to repair and increases system availability. DCIM systems which automate the change management process will log both authorized and unauthorized changes, increasing the data available to the problem manager and increasing the chances the issue can be quickly resolved.

Root Cause Analysis
One of the problems sometimes faced by data center managers is too much data. Disconnecting a router from the network might cause tens or hundreds of link lost alarms for the downstream devices. It is often difficult to find the root cause amidst all of the “noise” associated with cascading events. By understanding the relationship between devices, DCIM solution can help to narrow the focus to the single device — the router, in this case — which is causing the problem.  By directing focus on the root cause, the problem can be resolved more quickly, reducing the associated downtime.

IMPROVED MANAGEABILITY

DCIM solutions can improve manageability in the following areas:

Data Center Audits
Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPA and CFR-11 increase the requirements for physical equipment audits. DCIM solutions provide a single source of the data to greatly reduce the time and cost to complete the audits. Those DCIM tools utilizing asset auto-discovery and asset location mechanisms such as RFID can further reduce the effort to perform a physical audit.

Asset Management
DCIM can be used to determine the best place to deploy new equipment based on the availability of rack space, power, cooling and network ports. It then can be used to track all of the changes from the initial request through deployment, system moves and changes, all the way through to decommissioning. The DCIM solution can provide detailed information on thousands of assets in the data center including location, system configuration, how much power it is drawing, relationship to other devices, and so on, without having to rely on spreadsheets or home-grown tools.

Capacity Planning
With a new or expanded data center representing a substantial capital investment, the ability to postpone new data center builds could save millions of dollars. DCIM solutions can be used to reclaim capacity at the server, rack and data center levels to maximize space, power and cooling resources. Using actual device power readings instead of the overly conservative nameplate values will allow an increase in the number of servers supported by a PDU without sacrificing availability. DCIM tools can track resource usage over time and provide much more accurate estimates of when additional equipment needs to be purchased.

This is the fifth article in the Data Center Knowledge Guide to DCIM series. To download the complete DCK Guide to DCIM click here.

How data center managers can be prepared for the 10 most common surprises

1. Those high-density predictions finally are coming true: After rapid growth early in the century, projections of double-digit rack densities have been slow to come to fruition. Average densities hovered between 6.0 and 7.4 kW per rack from 2006 to 2009, but the most recent Data Center Users’ Group (DCUG) survey predicted average rack densities will reach 12.0 kW within three years. That puts a premium on adequate UPS capacity and power distribution as well as cooling to handle the corresponding heat output. 2. Data center managers will replace servers three times before they replace UPS or cooling systems: Server refreshes happen approximately every three years. Cooling and UPS systems are expected to last much longer—sometimes decades. That means the infrastructure organizations invest in today must be able to support—or, more accurately, scale to support—servers that may be two, three or even four generations removed from today’s models. What does that mean for today’s data center manager? It makes it imperative that today’s infrastructure technologies have the ability to scale to support future needs. Modular solutions can scale to meet both short- and long-term requirements. 3. Downtime is expensive: Everyone understands downtime is bad, but the actual costs associated with an unplanned outage are stunning. According to a Ponemon Institute study, an outage can cost an organization an average of about $5,000 per minute. That’s $300,000 in just an hour. The same study indicates the most common causes of downtime are UPS battery failure and exceeding UPS capacity. Avoid those problems by investing in the right UPS—adequately sized to support the load—and proactively monitoring and maintaining batteries. 4. Water and the data center do not mix – but we keep trying: The first part of this probably isn’t a surprise. Sensitive IT equipment does not respond well to water. However, the aforementioned Ponemon study indicates 35 percent of all unplanned outages are a result of some type of water incursion. These aren’t just leaky valves; in fact, many water-related outages are the result of a spilled coffee or diet soda. The fix: Check those valves, but more importantly, check the drinks at the door. 5. New servers use more power than old servers: Sever consolidation and virtualization can shrink server inventory by huge numbers, but that doesn’t exactly equate to huge energy savings. New virtualized servers, especially powerful blade servers, can consume four or five times as much energy as those from the preceding generation (although they usually do it more efficiently). The relatively modest savings at the end of that consolidation project may come as a surprise. There is no fix for this, but prepare for it by making sure the infrastructure is adequate to support the power and cooling needs of these new servers. 6. Monitoring is a mess: IT managers have more visibility into their data centers than ever before, but accessing and making sense of the data that comes with that visibility can be a daunting task. According to a survey of data center professionals, data center managers use, on average, at least four different software platforms to manage their physical infrastructure. Forty-one percent of those surveyed say they produce three or more reports for their supervisors every month, and 34 percent say it takes three hours or more to prepare those reports. The solution? Move toward a single monitoring and management platform. Today’s DCIM solutions can consolidate that information and proactively manage the infrastructure to improve energy and operational efficiency and even availability. 7. The IT guy is in charge of the building’s HVAC system: The gap between IT and Facilities is shrinking, and the lion’s share of the responsibility for both pieces is falling on the IT professionals. Traditionally, IT and data center managers have had to work through Facilities when they need more power or cooling to support increasing IT needs. That process is being streamlined, thanks in large part to those aforementioned DCIM solutions that increase visibility and control over all aspects of a building’s infrastructure. Forward-thinking data center managers are developing a DCIM strategy to help them understand this expansion of their roles and responsibilities. 8. That patchwork data center needs to be a quilt: In the past, data center managers freely mixed and matched components from various vendors because those systems worked together only tangentially. That is changing. The advent of increasingly intelligent, dynamic infrastructure technologies and monitoring and management systems has increased the amount of actionable data across the data center, delivering real-time modeling capabilities that enable significant operational efficiencies. IT and infrastructure systems still can work independently, but to truly leverage the full extent of their capabilities, integration is imperative. 9. Data center on demand is a reality: The days of lengthy design, order and deployment delays are over. Today there are modular, integrated, rapidly deployable data center solutions for any space. Integrated, virtually plug-and-play solutions that include rack, server and power and cooling can be installed easily in a closet or conference room. On the larger end, containerized data centers can be used to quickly establish a network or to add capacity to an existing data center. The solution to most problems is a phone call away. 10. IT loads vary – a lot: Many industries see extreme peaks and valleys in their network usage. Financial institutions, for example, may see heavy use during traditional business hours and virtually nothing overnight. Holiday shopping and tax seasons also can create unusual spikes in IT activity. Businesses depending on their IT systems during these times need to have the capacity to handle those peaks, but often can operate inefficiently during the valleys. A scalable infrastructure with intelligent controls can adjust to those highs and lows to ensure efficient operation. http://www.datacenterworld.com/preparing-for-10-common-data-center-surprise