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Southern Methodist University’s upcoming fall 2014 graduate degree program in data center engineering is clear indication of the need for trained data center professionals in the marketplace. According to the U.S. Department of Labor statistics, the data center operations workforce tops 4 million people today and is expected to grow to more than two million by 2018. But how many of them are formally trained in data center operations best practices? While traditionally data centers have been run by IT staff, they have now evolved to a point where they require specialization in functional areas such as: facilities, infrastructure and subsystems; data center systems engineering and analytic...
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Worldwide demand for real-time data, applications, and services has led to an unprecedented increase in data center density and energy costs. While IT equipment accounts for 50% of those energy costs, another 37% is consumed when cooling and circulating air; a figure that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
IT departments often overcool data centers to ensure that their mission critical equipment will not fail due to overheating. But studies have shown this is an unnecessary and costly practice. According to David J. Cappuccio, Gartner Managing VP and Chief of research:
“Data center managers can save up to 4 percent in energy costs for every degree of upward change in...
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The best time to get funding for DCIM is in conjunction with a major business-related IT project such as a data center construction, relocation, co-location, expansion, or even the deployment of a new business-critical application. The budget for all of these projects will likely include an allocation for additional resources and tools to facilitate successful project execution.
As you prepare your argument for stakeholders and decision makers, first identify your most costly data center problems that can be fixed with DCIM. Focus on those problems that are most critical and are of “highest-value”, i.e. cost the most to you operationally.
For instance, once a data center has grown bey...
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You’ve been here before – a new enterprise solution comes out of nowhere promising to cut costs, reduce inefficiencies, and increase productivity – and now you’re scrambling to figure out if those seemingly intangible value propositions are really something you need, how it all fits into your current system, whether you can ever hope to recoup your initial investment, and what it spells for your career in both the best and worst case scenarios.
Well DCIM isn’t that kind of a solution. At its core, there are real, measurable value propositions that are self-evident to any data center employee: Efficient energy consumption, effective infrastructure management, and maintaining high availabilit...
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There’s a lot of hype and discussion about Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and associated DCIM Companies. You might be like many others in that are just learning about what DCIM in of itself provides. Or you might be more experienced but confused by all features that different DCIM Vendors have to offer. While the market is still in the early adopter phase we have seen successful DCIM deployments. The keys to these successes have been based on a lot of discussion, review and priority setting. To ease in selecting a DCIM vendor and solution, we suggest that you review these 10 key considerations:
1. Be clear on the data center problems you are trying to solve. Select and...
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While it might appear that restructuring space in an existing Data Center might be less costly than moving to a new one, the reality is that it really might not be. Do your research; determine the compromises you might have to make, and carefully plan for your move. Consider using a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution to complement the physical move. What follows is a high-level summary of the process that Greg Rutledge, Data Center Manager and Trey Jones, Director of IT Infrastructure Services for Houston Methodist Hospital used in deciding their strategy.
When the Houston Methodist Hospital Data Center started to run out of space, Greg and Trey took a look at thre...
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Data center management best practices call for a strategic approach to balancing IT service delivery and cost efficiency. With the growing complexity of data centers from the demand for new service offerings and the sheer amount of physical compute, network, and storage required to provide those services, data center managers are quickly realizing that manual tools, such as Excel spreadsheets and Visio diagrams, are no longer an effective way to manage their data centers. Instead, sophisticated data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools that measure, monitor, and provide a best practices operations framework are needed.
According to a 2012 IDC report “Most are pursuing a path to ensu...
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Managing a data center and therefore Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is by nature complex. Each vendor has a slightly different twist on the definition and no two data center operations managers are the same – each may require different pieces to best manage their facilities and IT infrastructure. With these sometimes divergent viewpoints no one vendor may exactly match the needs of each organization. Understanding what you want from your DCIM implementation will be key to choosing the right data center tool vendor and having a “successful“ deployment.
So how do you begin to discern your choices?
In an analyst report, Gartner stated that “DCIM tools provide data center o...
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NetworkWorld Asia recently awarded Sunbird their Readers' Choice Product Excellence Award 2013 for Data Center Capacity Planning and Services. These awards are given to leading vendors for the innovative technologies and solutions they provide to Asia businesses. Awards are presented based on votes from the readers of NetworkWorld Asia magazine, and the Networks Asia, Security Asia and Storage Asia websites.
As the Data Center Capacity Planning and Services winner, Sunbird was recognized for its DCIM solution that provides the capability to view Data Center assets from the lowest level in the power chain to the highest level. This visualization provides Data Center Managers with the ab...
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Preparing to issue a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) bid? Do you know what you actually need or what your requirements are? There are many choices of vendors and solutions, each having a slightly different twist. When issuing your bid, Request for Quote (RFQ), or Request for Proposal (RFP) describe your specific problems and desired outcome to potential vendors and challenge them to show how you can achieve objectives with their product and support.
Provide the bid to two or at most three DCIM products/vendors thoroughly with respect to your “must have” requirements. Any more, your evaluations might dilute the resources and the process. Ensure that your bid includes both func...
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Data centers have seen an explosion of enterprise software, mobile applications, and data storage over the past five years. So it should come as no surprise that the cost of data center downtime has risen dramatically alongside the bevy of interconnected devices and mission critical systems that have inundated facilities nationwide.
According to a recent Emerson Network Power report, 91% of U.S. data centers have experienced an unplanned outage in the past two years, with data centers losing an average of $690,204 per outage. Additionally, unplanned data center outages over the past year alone have cost 67 of the report participants a collective loss of over $46.2 million dollars.
At a...
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While datacenters are continuing to evolve, the list of pain points around managing the necessary resources and changes to datacenter assets continues to grow. But how do you decide whether Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is the right choice for you, and if so, whether a specific solution can meet your needs?
Sunbird’s new website, sunbirdDCIM.com, makes learning about DCIM, the components to consider when selecting a DCIM provider, the benefits from a DCIM and more importantly, how to get started easy. We know that datacenter managers have many choices in how to best approach infrastructure management, and at raritanDCIM.com, visitors can learn why our customers believe that...
Preparing to issue a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) bid? Do you know what you actually need or what your requirements are? There are many choices of vendors and solutions, each having a slightly different twist. When issuing your bid, Request for Quote (RFQ), or Request for Proposal (RFP) describe your specific problems and desired outcome to potential vendors and challenge them to show how you can achieve objectives with their product and support. Provide the bid to two or at most three DCIM products/vendors thoroughly with respect to your “must have” requirements. Any more, your evaluations might dilute the resources and the process. Ensure that your bid includes both func...