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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 A few forgetful employees and unsaved updates can corrupt records with incorrect, out of date or missing data.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...
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Information Technology is so fundamental to every business today that every organization needs to establish formal processes to ensure that IT services are continually aligned to the business, and deliver efficient and reliable support over the entire lifecycle of products and services. These processes, commonly classified as IT Service Management (ITSM), may follow a well-known model such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) or, more likely, a set of internally-developed best practices.
Regardless of the chosen approach, it will typically include a database that defines the current overall IT function status accompanied by a set of ITSM processes with well- defined steps and workflow rule...
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Traditionally, systems for monitoring and managing IT devices and facility objects have existed as separate entities. But, as the data center power chain has grown larger and more interdependent, operators have begun to embrace the need for an intelligent unified management tool that can bridge the gap between IT and facilities in order to effectively manage numerous data center subsystems, improve efficiencies, and maintain availability.
Being able to gather information from IT assets like servers, network switches, and rack PDUs, as well as from facilities objects like CRACs, UPS, and RPPs, provides data center operators with far more accurate and complete views of data center events. ...
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In IDC’s latest study—“IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) Datacenter Infrastructure Management Solution 2014 Vendor Assessment”— Sunbird was positioned prominently in the “Major Players” category and portrayed as having one of the largest DCIM market footprints in the region.
This new study is designed to help IT buyers compare vendors’ current capabilities and strategies relative to one another and to the factors that IDC believes will be most conducive to future success in the DCIM market.
According to the IDC report, “Sunbird has defined itself in the DCIM market by providing an open, robust solution for midsize enterprise data centers. It has a strong focus on AP...
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As a data center manager in a colocation provider facility you are tasked with not only monitoring the health of your data center infrastructure, but providing outstanding service to your customers. Whether your customer is internal – such as your management team, or external – such as those you provide space for, you need tools that can provide for scalability, flexibility, and accountability of your data center assets and information within. These were the objectives that Exponential-e, the leading U.K. provider of networking and cloud services, had in mind when they decided to offer a Tier III data center and expand their colocation offerings.
With the new 71,500-squarefoot (1,625m2)...
