What Is DCIM? How It Optimizes Data Center Operations

How important is data in an organization?

Businesses today are data-heavy, regardless of their size. Data comes in various forms, such as transactional data, reporting data, machine data, or Big Data. It’s an industry in itself, turning into a significant player in the organizational arena.

Organizations handling large amounts of data often resort to data centers for their operations. With the advent of multiple data centers, data center infrastructure management has gained substantial mileage for its proven efficiency.

Data center infrastructure management software is used to manage and optimize the performance of organizational data centers. It’s responsible for the maintenance, documentation, and asset distribution aspects of a data center. 

A data center is a physical storage facility for organizations to store their enterprise-level data and applications. It consists of network equipment, firewalls, storage drives, and servers.

DCIM serves as an all-in-one solution to be used across all data center domains of an organization. It acts as a bridge between organizational domains such as facilities, systems, and networks.

Why does your business need DCIM?

DCIM allows businesses to use their data center networking resources as efficiently as possible. Let’s find out how DCIM can help your business in multiple functional areas.

• Track usage: DCIM software tracks the usage of resources, power consumption details, and environmental data. It gives organizations a fair idea of how their resources are utilized and what resources can be onboarded for a better growth trajectory.
• Energy efficiency: DCIM can help you track energy usage and redirect energy sources to essential systems. It also ensures that sudden power outages are diagnosed and avoided.
• Plan backup measures: DCIM captures data that can plan backups for system failures and IT malfunctioning. It provides backup power generators, cloud backups, and exigency plans for handling recurrent and unforeseen failures.
• Optimize process workflows: DCIM systems can help organizations manage their servers and workload and balance the IT equipment power usage. This optimizes process workflows since work is done more efficiently with less overhead.
• Increase business uptime: IT downtimes caused by configuration issues, third-party outages, network connectivity failure, and general power outages can be avoided safely with DCIM tracking. This increases the business uptime in the long run.
• Better cost-efficiency: Your business needs DCIM-enabled energy efficiency and process optimization to ensure the cost efficiency of hardware acquisition or energy equipment.

Traditional DCIM software vs. next-generation DCIM software

DCIM software can be primarily divided into two categories: Traditional and next-generation DCIM software.

Traditional DCIM software manages and reports IT asset performance, maintains the infrastructure, ensures efficient energy and bandwidth utilization for all the organizational resources. The problem with traditional DCIM software was high deployment time and complexity in use and maintenance.

Next-generation DCIM software provides additional functionalities on top of those offered by traditional DCIM software to address the issues above. It’s primarily hosted on cloud premises and delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. It’s easier to deploy because it doesn’t need any on-premises infrastructure. Disaster recovery is made more accessible through cloud backups, and software updates are installed automatically.

Components of DCIM

DCIM components provide your organization with a comprehensive view of your data center and its performance to optimize resource utilization. Let’s take a look at the essential components of any DCIM software setup.

• Data repository: A DCIM setup contains a stable data repository that encompasses data from all the data centers and equipment across the organization. This includes physical data assets, data center layout, and network connections.
• Resource tracker: DCIM has resource tracking components to track and monitor the details, usage, and interdependencies of resources.
• Graphical visualizer: DCIM setup has graphical visualization powers over physical and logical components such as servers, networks, and power infrastructure. It helps in the virtualization of resource usage and energy consumption. This also helps in providing data center managers with better operational efficiency over their resources.
• Resource deployer: Automated workflows and automation tools to support new resource deployment are necessary components of DCIM. They also support the physical and logical resources related to any new deployment.
• Real-time data monitor: DCIM software enables real-time data monitoring and integration with monitoring systems to visualize and optimize resource utilization.
• Procedure manager: DCIM software needs to implement required and timely changes in the workflow management process to ensure lesser data inaccuracies and redundancies.
• Capacity Planner: The capacity planning component of a DCIM setup helps in resource acquisition, power and space planning, and in what-if analysis of various business scenarios.
• Data reporter: Data reporting is an essential component that helps set up and measure operational goals, resource performance, and efficiency improvement.

Benefits of using DCIM

DCIM software provides intelligent data center operation support for your organization while supporting your existing infrastructure and data strategy. Let’s check out its benefits in detail.

Key metrics analysis

DCIM software enables organizations to track their key metrics such as database performance, energy efficiency, power consumption, and disc capacity. A thorough analysis of such metrics provides a holistic idea of the data center operations and how they can be improved for the organization.

Resource management

DCIM eases resource management by identifying the resources working efficiently and those with scope to improve. Resources can be updated or replaced according to their usage metrics.

Problem detection

Problems and bottlenecks in data center operations can be caught on early using DCIM software, thus improving the quality of business operations.

Process optimization

DCIM tools allow organizations to streamline and optimize their software upgrade process. Since data center software is under constant vigilance, they perform to the best of their abilities and are updated according to the market standards.

Challenges of using DCIM

DCIM is an effective solution for organizations to plan and optimize their data center operations. It comes with a few challenges that need to be addressed and identified before onboarding this software.

Cost-effectiveness

DCIM solutions are not suitable for low revenue organizations because of the involved cost factor. Onboarding a DCIM solution is an expensive affair and will incur many infrastructure and human resources costs.

Training of personnel

DCIM software onboarding will require training and hiring professionals to manage the software effectively. DCIM software has metrics such as revenue, power consumption, and memory tracking that need specialized training for employees to understand it completely.

Unsuitability for small scale organizations

DCIM software is not very cost-effective or performance-optimizing in small-scale organizations. This is because of the lower data requirements and storage capacity of small companies. They don’t need DCIM software to manage their day-to-day data operations.

Best DCIM software

Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software helps organizations manage, monitor, and organize components of a data center. IT assists in data management and documentation for data centers and helps optimize the asset’s performance.

To qualify for inclusion as a DCIM software provider, a solution must:

• Support asset management and support for data centers
• Allow asset performance optimization
• Ensure maximum uptime and business continuity

*This list is based on G2 data collected on October 26, 2021. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.

1. Microsoft System Center

Microsoft System Center brings the power of Microsoft Cloud Platform with an all-inclusive package of asset monitoring, automation, and performance optimization for your organization.

What users like:

“Microsoft system center helps a lot to automate the update deployment for my windows infrastructure. It also supports other OS families as well. Installation is simple, and it’s easily integrated with Cloud. Microsoft System Center is a suite of tools that includes configuration manager, data protection manager, and operation manager.”

- Microsoft System Center Review, Amit D.

What users dislike:

“I feel there can be more info on the interface pane for real time asset control that links to a service call system like some other solutions I've used alongside SCCM. The pricing for Education seems a bit high. The client seems a bit buggy while multicasting over 100 systems at one time.”

- Microsoft System Center Review, Randy M.

2. Device42

Device42 is a comprehensive solution for managing application and infrastructure dependencies. It provides detailed insights into asset performance and infrastructure management.

What users like:

“I really like the clear structure of Device42. In addition, I like that it is effortless to work with IP addresses. Devices are also designed to make it very easy. These can be cloned from the hardware very well. I additionally like the ease of managing users. This is easily controllable through Active Directory (AD).”

- Device42 Review, Simon W.

What users dislike:

“Deleting organization items is not as easy as adding them in. Not all options are available upon initial asset entry. Items in room layout cannot overlap, and users cannot change the grid size factor.”

- Device42 Review, Giovanni S.

3. Nlyte

Nlyte eases the automation process for asset performance tracking and helps create customizable DCIM software that’s highly scalable.

What users like:

“Nlyte Software is one the best in the market. It makes life easy to keep all the asset information. The best part is the graphical view, and you can keep all the information in detail. Key features and reports are fantastic too. Easy and user-friendly. Thumbs up for the V11.5 and their customer support. I would recommend it to everyone.”

- Nlyte Review, Dilip S.

What users dislike:

“The quirks of the BDM (Bulk Data Manager uploading tool) can be cumbersome and take some getting used to, plus the different asset classes can feel restrictive. However, once you are used to the structure of Nlyte, this fades greatly. Nlyte would benefit from adding CFD capabilities to its native package.”

- Nlyte Review, Matthew M.

4. Atlassian Data Center

Atlassian Data Center solutions include all of the functionality in a computer server but with greater infrastructure flexibility and support for big or expanding teams. It empowers IT admins to handle network infrastructure and data center performance with a suite of products.

What users like:

“I love how easy it is to find help for my questions and help create tickets straight from the Help Center. It is easy to use and gets the info to the right person promptly.”

- Atlassian Data Center Review, Whitney B.

What users dislike:

“I think the tracking could be a bit better. More integrations to the solution could add to ease of use. Overall the main pain point I've experienced is just getting started. Learning the in's and out's of this software takes some time and practice.”

- Atlassian Data Center Review, Ashley L.

5. Turbonomic

Turbonomic is an artificial intelligence-powered application resource management system that optimizes performance, compliance, and expense in real-time. Applications are constantly and automatically resourced to perform while meeting business limitations.

What users like:

“It prevents over and under-provisioning of virtual machines automatically. It also helps in workload placement and storage optimization. In more than one case, it located orphaned and temporary files in our infrastructure that were consuming an excessive amount of space unnecessarily.”

- Turbonomic Review, Eric W.

What users dislike:

“Product cannot create customized role-based permissions within the namespace. I have some groups that need to be scoped to specific monitoring targets but still can manage and create policies. They cannot perform specific actions without their roles being elevated to higher permission that works at a global level and not a scoped level for the target.

Unfortunately, this allows them to interact with resources across all targets not intended for their scope. The only solution is to utilize separate instances of the service.”

- Turbonomic Review, Matt K.

Handle your data woes with DCIM

DCIM is undoubtedly a worthy addition to your data center software stack since it provides you with complete authority to manage your data center operations while providing intelligent insights into your resources.

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