Can DCIM’s AI-Driven Future Increase Data Center Sustainability?

The rapid expansion of AI, big data, and IoT has intensified the complexity of data center capacity and infrastructure management. However, with data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions’ digital intelligence, operators can integrate the latest advanced technologies and simplify their mission-critical facility operations. 

This has boosted the DCIM market, which is expected to reach $5.01 billion by 2029. By 2030, US-based companies are expected to invest over $1.6 trillion in capital expenditures on hyperscale data centers and AI computing infrastructure, representing over 40 percent of the $7 trillion projected global total. 

DCIM Keeps Data Centers’ Energy Appetite in Check 

Considering that in 2024, the global data center energy usage accounted for nearly 1% of total energy consumption, U.S. data centers’ energy consumption is projected to reach up to 12 percent by 2028. With large AI models consuming energy equivalent to thousands of homes, data center operators now face heightened scrutiny over the energy consumption surge, environmental impact, carbon footprint, and governance. 

By integrating DCIM solutions, operators can efficiently manage and keep energy consumption in check with real-time visibility into critical data across multiple devices and systems. As substantial volumes of data are analyzed in real-time, operators can make proactive, data-driven business decisions to enhance equipment performance, and preempt failures for operational efficiency and environmental sustainability.  

This has transformed DCIM solutions from merely a reporting tool into a proactive digital intelligence network that helps:  

• Optimize resource allocation and energy consumption efficiency by analyzing workload patterns and adjusting infrastructure accordingly 

• Proactively control energy consumption, respond to alerts signaling power usage discrepancies, and reduce energy-intensive maintenance resulting from equipment failures  

• Optimize power and cooling needs and preempt potential failures by flagging proactive maintenance and planning 

In identifying energy inefficiencies, operators can reduce downtime, improve operational efficiency, increase sustainability, and ultimately enhance data center resilience in managing fluctuating loads. This allows operators to:  

• Set alerts and adjust settings to collect necessary data for on-demand validation  

• Track trends over time to improve decision making and reliability 

• Establish energy and sustainability goals and adjust the system in real time to avoid future overspending  

Operators can also use DCIM solutions to set and achieve long-term strategic goals, while maximizing operational impact, by:  

• Minimizing energy consumption and meeting Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance 

• Streamlining ESG reporting by collecting comprehensive data sets on sustainability metrics, including carbon emissions, energy consumption, water use, and fuel use for generators 

• Building dedicated ESG dashboards for on-demand data retrieval and automated report generation. 

As more data centers host AI applications, DCIM solutions become more critical tools for monitoring power demands and improving data feed latency. Considering how small increases in operational load spike megawatts of grid power, scalable DCIM software’s real-time telemetry data can provide full visibility across all facilities’ systems, so operators can shift workloads, balance power loads, eliminate power grid overloads or risk costly outages.  

In expediting data collection from a range of systems and across globally distributed servers, DCIM solutions also enable operators to increase data collection speeds without any bottlenecks. 

Optimizing Physical Resources  

With the proliferation of multi-site data center operations, DCIM solutions are increasingly essential for addressing the challenges of remote monitoring and provisioning in decentralized environments, particularly for edge computing. Operators can efficiently monitor the operational performance and track assets in real-time from dispersed edge infrastructure. They can also streamline workflows and proactively address risks to equipment, security, power, and cooling systems to ensure greater uptime while avoiding costly downtime.  

DCIM solutions also allow operators to optimize physical resources across data centers as their digital workloads spike. This allows for effective planning for allocated space, power, and cooling needs, and new equipment requirements, while preventing outages and costly downtime.  

With automated tasks and alerts, operators can be notified and proactively resolve flagged issues remotely. This expedites efficient and cost-effective management of distributed sites and assets by using a single, holistic platform. DCIM's real-time alerts facilitate access to critical datapoints and enable timely responses and repairs, enhancing overall risk mitigation with remote monitoring and troubleshooting. 

Safeguarding Against Elevated Cyberthreats 

As most data centers adopt hybrid cloud environments and utilize third-party vendors, the risk of cyberattacks such as data theft, malware, phishing, and data leaks has significantly increased. A global study by Statista found that data breaches cost on average $4.88 million per incident between May 2020 and February 2024.  

With 100 percent uptime non-negotiable for all data centers that are enabling AI’s massive-scale computations, a cyberattack targeting any aspect of a data center’s operational technology (responsible for all equipment controls of cooling or power) is a costly risk that can result in instant failures of components critical to AI operations.  

In addition to managing security, ensuring compliance, and enhancing threat detection, DCIM solutions are operators’ security and defense shields against cyber threats. In strengthening the infrastructure through physical access monitoring to detect hardware behavior anomalies, DCIM solutions help automate threat detection and safeguard data center infrastructure from cyber-attacks.  

More importantly, DCIM solutions must be integrated with the facilities’ physical security. To ensure systems are up to date, operators must implement strong access controls and encrypt communications. Segmenting networks can also further reduce attack surfaces.  

DCIM Solutions Future-Proof Data Center Infrastructure  

DCIM solutions are a data-driven intelligence system that prompts tactical business decision-making. Operators rely on DCIM solutions to forecast capacity by collecting and analyzing historical and real-time data on their space, power, cooling, and compute resources. By analyzing this broad data set, operators can identify trends and forecast future needs more effectively.  

In eliminating antiquated, manual spreadsheets, DCIM solutions’ real-time, holistic view of a data center allows for predictive CapEx forecasting and lifecycle planning by aligning IT and facilities teams. It also provides ROI calculations that can be readily turned into segmented reports to meet the specific needs of various stakeholders.  

In our hyperconnected, 24/7 digital reality, made possible by data centers’ optimized uptime, downtime risks are not an option when, on average, downtimes cost an estimated $9,000 per minute, and can easily exceed $1 million per hour in the case of major enterprises.  

Without DCIM solutions, organizations might as well be functioning in the dark, lacking full visibility and control over their resources. Not to mention that being in a reactive, costly, and less agile approach to facilities management is not an option for a profitable business. 

The consequences of increased downtime, operational inefficiencies, and higher costs due to under-or overprovisioning resources will eventually lead to capacity planning challenges that can further hinder sustainability compliance.  

In the fragmented data center infrastructure environment, where operators face daily challenges and risks due to siloed data, DCIM solutions remain essential intelligence tools that reliably scale to unify data from power and cooling systems. Ultimately, in providing visibility into real-time data analytics of all operational systems, DCIM solutions enable proactive alerts that allow operators to reduce downtime, lower energy consumption, and significantly impact the bottom line without losing sleep about the unpredictability of “what-if” scenarios.