Why real-time data is at the heart of the DCIM movement

Data centre intelligence systems, business intelligence or DCIM (data centre infrastructure management); all of these terms serve the same purpose – to provide businesses a clear understanding of their IT environment to control costs more effectively, realistically plan into the future and help senior management better position the business to meet marketplace developments and shifts.

That said, the transformative benefits DCIM promises relies on one important metric – accurate data delivered through a real-time system. Just as Big Data (or more accurately for some businesses, massively unmanageable data) is driving data centre growth and raising the issue of IT sustainability, real-time data is actually helping control it.

Aiming for clarity
As every data centre professional knows, DCIM is only as powerful as the data coming out of it. Having a poorly configured, inaccurate DCIM solution can cause havoc across a business. Out-of-date information yields a whole host of risks ranging from financial penalties caused by poor auditing to productivity and revenue implications through business critical systems’ downtime.

This may be surprising to some, but DCIM is not actually the silver bullet many providers will have you believe - it is in fact just the delivery device, the gun. You can aim at achieving data centre visibility with DCIM alone but without any ammunition, i.e. real-time data, you’ll miss your intended target. This has led to the creation of a unique symbiotic relationship – as one gets stronger, the other profits equally. Take one part away and the other will struggle to function at all. Data about infrastructure is irrelevant if there is no means of deciphering it. Likewise, a data interpretation platform is defunct if it is not receiving its bread and butter, actionable intelligence.

Educating data
451 Research found the DCIM marketplace to be worth £275 million in 2012 and in the first quarter of 2013, there were a record number of orders for DCIM. With evidence like this showing how quickly and dramatically the industry is changing, it can be overwhelming to identify a successful strategy for ensuring a fiscally smart, optimised data centre. The key question is how to leverage DCIM to ensure data centre sustainability while simultaneously consolidating existing infrastructure and managing costs.

This three pronged approach is of course possible, but it needs to be addressed in the right way otherwise the opposite can happen – management solutions without the right data will escalate mismanagement, eat into budgets and waste manpower. Naturally the level of competition poses an equal number of questions to businesses looking to improve their data centre operations – an overcrowded vendor marketplace, conflicting solution functionality, a range of partner implementations and general cost will give any data centre manager a headache.

A part of every data centre
Regardless of the chosen solution, real-time active tracking is now a ‘must have’ not a ‘nice to have’ component of the modern data centre. The financial, performance and security implications of a data centre environment that is shrouded in mystery are huge.

For example, according to Emerson every IT outage has an average cost (through lost productivity, equipment replacement and impacted revenue) of roughly £500,000. The reverse is equally worth paying attention to. With the right level of real-time data centre intelligence, power can be optimised, cooling-related costs reduced and the life span of assets improved. For every one-degree temperature improvement implemented, power-related costs are reduced by two per cent. Savings of this scale are extremely welcome at a time when IT departments are expected to run a lean, highly optimised environment.

A secure future
The same applies to DCIM’s involvement in ensuring a secure, audited IT ecosystem. Lost assets through carelessness, industrial espionage and general theft can become regular occurrences for organisations that lack a clear picture of their IT environment.

Knowing exactly where everything is at all times is no longer an avoidable expense; rather it is a crucial part of ensuring business continuity and regulatory compliance. Real-time data is yet again central to the data centre’s existence. Whatever the sector, ignorance is no longer acceptable. It costs time, often thousands, if not millions of pounds in fines, reduces customer trust, impacts sales cycles and often threatens the business’s entire survival. How does negligence come about? Not knowing enough about the assets that contain the business’s lifeblood – data. In every respect, data centre sustainability and security is reliant on data whether data is protecting it, powering it, inhabiting it or threatening it.

Working together
With data management moving past its infancy and DCIM still a fledgling term, providers will need to work together in these early stages to serve the enterprise’s needs effectively. It is quite possible that in several years the acronym DCIM will become an out-dated term and instead will have been replaced with a term that encompasses a range of solutions, all of which are driven by data and its interpretation. As the business landscape changes, so will the solutions that support it. This is what the data centre landscape really needs – a comprehensive platform for managing IT, facilities, staff location, applications, data virtualisation, security and storage.

This unified approach, supported by an automated layer of real-time data, is much closer to meeting the needs of the modern enterprise than a fragmented term like DCIM.

Only when real-time data becomes an industry-wide expectation will DCIM really begin to excel, especially as it becomes implemented within a converged platform to allow the efficient running of scalable, future-conscious facilities.