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.

Why Do I Need #DCIM ?

by Micahel Potts

There are a number of benefits in implementing a Data Center Infrastructure System (DCIM) solution.  To illustrate this point, consider the primary components of data center management.

In the Design phase, DCIM provides key information in designing the proper infrastructure.  Power, cooling and network data at the rack level help to determine the optimum placement of new servers.  Without this information, data center managers have to rely on guesswork to make key decisions on how much equipment can be placed into a rack.  Too little equipment strands valuable data center resources (space, power and cooling).  Too much equipment increases the risk of shutdown due to exceeding the available resources.

In the Operations phase, DCIM can help to enforce standard processes for operating the data center.  These consistent, repeatable processes reduce operator errors which can account for as much as 80% of system outages.

In the Monitoring phase, DCIM provides operational data, including environmental data (temperature, umidity, air flow), power data (at the device, rack, zone and data center level), and cooling data.  In addition, DCIM may also provide IT data such as server resources (CPU, memory, disk, network).  This data can be used to alert management when thresholds are exceeded, reducing the mean time to repair and increasing availability.

In the Predictive Analysis phase, DCIM analyzes the key performance indicators from the monitoring phase as key input into the planning phase. Capacity planning decisions are made based during this phase.  Tracking the usage of key resources over time, for example, can provide valuable input to the decision on when to purchase new power or cooling equipment.

In the Planning phase, DCIM can be used to analyze “what if” scenarios such as server refreshes, impact of virtualization, and equipment moves, adds and changes. If you could summarize DCIM in one word, it would be information.  Every facet of data center management revolves around having complete and accurate information.

DCIM provides the following benefits:

•  Access to accurate, actionable data about the current state and future needs of the data center

•  Standard procedures for equipment changes

•  Single source of truth for asset management

•  Better predictability for space, power and cooling capacity means increased time to plan

•  Enhanced understanding of the present state of the power and cooling infrastructure and environment increases the overall availability of the data center

•  Reduced operating cost from energy usage effectiveness and efficiency

In his report, Datacenter Infrastructure Management Software: Monitoring, Managing and Optimizing the Datacenter, Andy Lawrence summed up the impact of DCIM by saying “We believe it is difficult to achieve the more advanced levels of datacenter maturity, or of datacenter effectiveness generally, without extensive use of DCIM software.”  He went on to add that “The three main drivers of nvestment in DCIM software are economics (mainly through energy-related savings), improved availability, and mproved manageability and flexibility.”

One of the primary benefits of DCIM is the ability to answer questions such as the following:

1. Where is my data center asset located?

2. Where is the best place to place a new server?

3. Do I have sufficient space, power, cooling and network connectivity to provide my needs for the next months?  Next year?  Next five years?

4. An event occurred in the data center — what happened, what services are impacted, where should the technicians go to resolve the issue?

5. Do I have underutilized resources in my data center?

6. Will I have enough power or cooling under fault or maintenance conditions?

Without the information provided by DCIM, the questions become much more difficult to answer.

#Datacenters are becoming software defined

‘Data centers are becoming software defined’ 
Data centers around the world are increasingly being virtualized and organizations are restructuring business processes in line with infrastructure transformations. Raghu Raghuram, SVP & GM, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware tells InformationWeek about the software defined data center, and how virtualized infrastructure will bring in more flexibility and efficiency

 By Brian Pereira, InformationWeek, May 18, 2012

What are the transformations that you observe in the data center? Can you update us on the state of virtualization?

Firstly, there is a transformation from physical to virtual, in all parts of the world. In terms of workloads in the data center, the percent (of workloads) running on virtualized infrastructure as against physical servers has crossed 50 percent. So, there are more applications running in the virtual environment, which means the operating system no longer sees the physical environment. This is a huge change in the data center. The virtual machine has not only become the unit of computing but also the unit of management.

Earlier, operational processes were built around a physical infrastructure but now these are built around virtualized infrastructure. The organization of the data center team is also changing. Earlier, you’d have an OS team, a server team, and teams for network, storage etc. Now virtualization forces all these things to come together. So, it is causing changes not only in the way hardware and software works, but also in the people and processes.

The second change is that data center architecture has gone from vertical to horizontal. You have the hardware and the virtualization layer with applications on top of it. Hence, you can manage the infrastructure separately from managing the applications. You can also take the application from your internal data center and put it on Amazon Web services or the external cloud. Thus, the nature of application management has changed.

How is the management of data center infrastructure changing?

The traditional and physical data center was built on the notions of vertical integration/silos. You’d put agents in the application and at the hardware and operating system levels. And then you’d pull all that information together (from the agents) and create a management console. And when the next application came into the data center you’d create another vertical stack for it, and so on. This led to the proliferation of management tools. And there was a manager of all the management tools. As a result, you were layered on more complexity instead of solving the management problem. The second problem was that operating systems did not have native manageability built into them. So, management was an afterthought. With virtualization, we were the first modern data center platform. We built manageability into the platform. For instance, the VMware distributed resource scheduler (DRS) automatically guarantees resources — you don’t need an external workload manager. We have built in high availability so you don’t need an external clustering manager. Our goal has been to eliminate management, and wherever possible turn it into automation.

We are going from a world of agents and reactive type of management to a world of statistical techniques for managing data. One of our customers has almost 100,000 virtual machines and they generate multiple million metrics every five minutes. There’s a flood of information, so you can’t use the conventional management way of solving a problem. You need to do real-time management and collect metrics all the time. We use statistical learning techniques to understand what’s going on. It is about proactive management and spotting problems before these occur. And this is a feature of VMware vCenter Operations.

What is the Software defined data center all about?

This is a bit forward looking. Increasingly, the data center is being standardized around x86 (architecture). And all the infrastructure functions that used to run on specialized ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) are now running on standard x86 hardware and being implemented via software as virtual machines. For instance, Cisco and CheckPoint are shipping virtual firewalls; HP is shipping virtual IDS devices; and RiverBed is shipping virtual WAN acceleration (optimization). All of it is becoming virtualized software; now the entire data center is becoming one form factor, on x86. As it is all software, they can be programmed more easily. And hence it can be automated. So, when an application comes into the data center, you automatically provision the infrastructure that it needs. You can grow/shrink that infrastructure. Scale it up or out. And configure policies or move them as the application moves.

All of this constitutes the software defined data center. It’s a new way of automating and providing the infrastructure needed for applications, as the applications themselves scale and react to end users. We see that rapidly emerging.

This is a concept in the large cloud data centers, but we want to bring it to mainstream enterprises and service providers.

VMware is a pioneer for virtualization of servers. But what are you offering for virtualized networking, security and storage?

There are smaller players such as Nicira Networks, which are actively pursuing network virtualization. Last year we announced (in collaboration with Cisco) a technology called VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible LAN). The difference between us and Nicira (network virtualization) is that we are doing it so that it works well with existing networking gear. We are creating a virtual network that is an overlay to the physical network. As the applications are set up, the networking can be done in a virtualized fashion. Load balancing and all the network services can happen in a virtualized fashion, without the need to reconfigure the physical network.

But you also need virtualized security services and virtualized network services for this. We have a line of products called vShield that offers this. It has a load balancer, NAT edge and stateful firewall; application firewall etc. Then, you have the management stack that ties it all together. We call this software defined networking and security. And we are doing the same thing with storage with Virtual Storage Appliance. We also offer storage provisioning automation with vSphere and vCloud Director.

What is the key focus for VMware this year?

Our slogan is business transformation through IT transformation. We want to enable businesses to transform themselves, by transforming IT. We talk about transformations with mobility, new application experiences, and modernizing infrastructure to make it more agile and cost-effective. These are the fundamental transformations that engage us with customers. So, it starts with virtualization but it doesn’t stop there. The faster customers progress through virtualization, the faster they can progress through the remaining stages of the transformation.

Oracle to give early view of software demand http://reut.rs/gFW7BB

Lawson Software receives $1.8 billion offer http://bit.ly/hmJe4X

Thailand pushes Software and Data Center firms http://bit.ly/dRbQEj