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With data center energy costs often accounting for 50% of total data center operating expenses, and the continual push to do more with less, energy management continues to be a focus of data center operators. With energy prices continuously in flux, reducing such significant costs would greatly improve savings of any company. According to BLS Strategies, “Data center operators and owners can minimize the impact of unpredictable energy markets by better understanding the markets and establishing smart energy procurement strategies.”
While often overlooked, understanding the market for energy has become more appealing to data center managers because it allows them to strategically manage...
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Join Us for a Free Webinar Moderated by IDC | July 16, 2015 2PM EST
IDC’s Jennifer Koppy leads an interactive webinar with data center leaders at UF Health Shands Hospital
and CareTech Solutions. Learn how to get buy-in from stakeholders, breakdown silos, increase collaboration,
and slash 50% on data center OPEX.
Discover how to drive change from day one, and set yourself up for more success well into the future.
Register Now
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Every day your expanding business forces you to stay within budget while meeting endless customer and organizational demands. Intelligent capacity planning keeps operations running smoothly by helping you prepare for the future. Take action according to your needs by understanding your capacity limitations, getting the most out of current capacity and adding capacity in a deliberate way.
Determining Capacity
Before you can plan for extra capacity, you must understand your current capabilities. You need to know about servers, cables, routers, switches and storage devices. You need to track existing racks, power supplies, cooling capacity and floor space across all data centers. Without data...
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Raritan to spin off Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) business - Introduces Sunbird Software
Raritan signs definitive agreement to be acquired by Legrand, spins off DCIM business unit adding additional resources, focus, and agility in a high growth data center market opportunity.
Somerset, NJ, 06/16/2015 – Raritan announced today a plan to separate its DCIM software business from Raritan in a transaction that will result in two independent and highly focused companies. Raritan will continue to focus on its Power and KVM hardware business and Sunbird Software will become a new company to focus entirely on the DCIM market, accelerating growth of software...
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Con Edison and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) are now offering performance-based financial incentives for companies seeking to undertake data center efficiency projects.
Under the Data Center Efficiency Program (DCEP) and the Demand Management Program (DMP) funding might be obtained through eligible projects including:
IT infrastructure Upgrades
Facilities Improvements
Facilities improvements include UPS, VFD, CRAC and cooling system upgrades. The implementation of a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) provides for facility improvement, including substantial savings in energy and therefore may qualify under facilities impr...
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Over the past several years, we have seen an unprecedented increase in traffic, data center growth, and the infrastructure within. On one hand, these changes have led to new services and growth for businesses. On the other, the management of the data center has become more challenging as IT data center managers look to do more with less. The procurement of tools that could be used to quickly and cost-effectively help with implementation has been put off due to the millions of other things that need to be done within the data center.
The reality is that it has become harder and harder to continue to work this way. You know it, but do your executive and financial teams know the data cent...
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With your data center constantly changing to keep up with user needs, how do you know if you are managing all of the components effectively? If your situation falls into one of these four scenarios, DCIM may create the efficiency boost you need to handle future growth.
1. You rely on multiple spreadsheets in different locations to track assets.
Excel files and Google docs function well enough when storing static information, but their brilliance fades when tracking statuses, processes and assets that frequently change. A few forgetful employees and unsaved updates can corrupt records with incorrect, out of date or missing data. In addition, integrating these files with other systems is ofte...
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For the last several years, ASHRAE has been advocating that data centers allow temperatures to rise in order to save money on cooling resources. Now, an upcoming study will assert that data centers save even further by allowing humidity to drop to an RH of 8 percent.
In a recent interview with Data Center Dynamics, Dan Beaty, Cofounder of ASHRAE's TC 9.9 said, "We ran a test with different types of floor tiles and clothing, and we found that between eight percent and 20-25 percent, the difference in static electricity is insignificant."
The finding could lead to significant operational cost savings. According to EnergyStar.Gov[1]:
A typical data center uses a great deal of energy main...
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Running a data center is expensive. The cost of equipment, infrastructure, and personnel add up quickly and can make running a data center losing proposition for an organization. That’s why it is important to operate efficiently and eliminate unnecessary expenses wherever possible. Here are five key areas that data centers can address to keep operating expenses in-line:
Doing Things Manually
If your staff performs record keeping via Excel® spreadsheets, they may be spending hundreds of man hours per year on tasks that can easily be automated. Time that is better spent improving service offerings and making strategic decisions for the data center. DCIM software offers workflow management...
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Data center infrastructure management, or DCIM, is a category of solutions that extend the traditional data center management function to include physical assets and resources found in IT domains. It aims to integrate information technology and facility management disciplines to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning of the critical systems within a data center. Complete DCIM services involve specialized software, intelligent asset tags and sensors and power solutions.
In 2014, Gartner recognized the DCIM market to be comprised of 75 vendor offerings.. If you are looking for DCIM vendors who can effectively manage your data center, here are some essential feature...
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As with any technology investment, a business owner should examine the return on investment (ROI) before making a purchasing decision on a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution. There are innumerable white papers and articles that point to the fact that DCIM – a solution that helps to address the infrastructure management needs of the data center - has a remarkable ROI. When a DCIM solution is properly implemented and managed, it saves hundreds of man-hours and helps maintain high availability, both of which increase business profits.
However, it is important for data center operators to understand that DCIM will not fully transform a data center overnight. It takes time,...
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Datacenters.com recently published a post on the 2015 top five data center trends which includes perspectives on industry trends in: cloud, virtualization, automation, the Internet of things (IoT), and physical size. Here, we will consider how a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool can help you to mitigate any potential disruptions while taking advantage of emerging frameworks that improve operational efficiency and help to increase your organization’s bottom-line.
First, what does the move to the cloud mean for your data center? According to the article, “the cloud is growing rapidly and is quickly evolving into a standard in every IT organization. In fact, cloud data cente...
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You know those servers that you have out in your data center, powered up but doing nothing, what do you do with them? While you can simply just let them continue running in your data center, they can actually be costing you more than you think. Consider that a typical five year old server, which may not be energy star compliant could consume 175 watts at idle. And if 10% of the servers in a 1000 server data center are ghost servers and electricity costs $0.15/kwh, we are talking about $23,000 of un-necessary expense. AND this is just for the server, never-mind the cooling expense. So what do you do? Do you take the risk and power them down, decommission them, and deal with potential s...
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For the fifth consecutive year, Sunbird was recognized in The Channel Company’s CRN Data Center 100 list for cutting-edge technologies that power, support and protect today’s data centers. The list features leading technology vendors whose solutions are vital to today’s data centers.
Sunbird - as one of the first to introduce DCIM solutions and create the intelligent rack power distribution unit (iPDU) category - was selected for its innovative solutions that solve critical data center issues, such as reducing power and cooling costs, finding infrastructure capacity, managing assets and monitoring performance.
Selected by the CRN editorial staff after months of in‐depth research and nom...
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According to the 451 Group, “A data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system collects and manages information about a data center’s assets, resource use and operational status.” When that information is provided in meaningful way, IT and facilities management’s decision making is vastly improved, which allows for better short-term management, and long-term planning and investments.
Consider for a moment what happens when data center operators are forced to rely on homegrown solutions like Visio and Excel spreadsheets. Due to the effort required to maintain them, static spreadsheets are often outdated and missing critical information that can only be found in an all-encompassing, a...
