What is Data Center Service Management (DCSM)?
The 451 Research Group describes DCSM as the “systems that provide the capability to manage and report on both facilities and IT equipment and resources from a physical point of view (such as numbers of servers in racks, placing of resources, visualization of datacenter floor, racks, cables, use of energy, etc.), and from a logical or virtual point of view (compute power, memory, processor utilization, storage in bytes, networking).”
The physical point of view being Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), and the logical point of view being IT Service Management (ITSM).
The Building Blocks – DCIM, DCSO, DCSM
Data center service optimization (DCSO) refers to the group of products that address the management of the supply and use of energy, real-time financial costing and long-term planning, and the converged management of IT and facilities.
- DCSO builds upon the framework of DCIM.
- DCSM is considered to be a core building-block component of DCSO and enables many of the DCSO functions.
ITSM and DCIM goals
The primary goal of ITSM is to better align IT with the business throughout the product or service delivery lifecycle, while the primary goal of DCIM is optimize the performance of the data center that serves that same business. The differences between the two – physical vs. logical – are outlined below:
| ITSM (Logical) | DCIM (Physical) |
|---|---|
| Manages virtual assets in a CMDB, that may include static DCIM information |
Manages infrastructure assets and capacity in a physical asset database:
|
|
Optimizes workflow within and outside of data center |
Tracks workflow within the data center for physical asset moves, adds and changes |
|
Tracks virtual resource information, including virtual resource use and associated costs |
Tracks and monitors environmental conditions, use of space, cooling, and power; energy efficiency and availability |
|
Provides Service Desk Change Management for all changes |
Provides Service Desk Change Management for physical changes |
Working together, through DCSM, workflows can remain aligned with an organization’s ITSM information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) processes and provide an end-to-end service management view.
The components of DCSO and built on the foundation of DCIM
The Benefits of DCSM
As efficiencies in the data center industry drive businesses toward a process and service view of IT service management, it is likely a similar evolution will occur in the data center. The need to integrate the business and data center views and end-to-end processes between both the IT and facilities infrastructure will be enabled through DCSM. DCSM will provide the benefits of:
Single-view of capacity for compute, storage, networks, power and space
End-to-End provisioning chargeback system
