Bob Hart, Field CTO at Device42
Choosing the right data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) solution is more important than ever so that you can manage growing data centre networks and assets while meeting stringent service-level agreements for performance and reliability. While you can zero in on features immediately, you’ll likely make a stronger choice if you use target business outcomes to drive decision-making.
You need strong inventory management capabilities to discover, report, and maintain the accuracy of all IT resources and configurations. A DCIM tool should support:
- Improving asset management: Capturing the entire range of assets, including physical, virtualized, software, cloud resources, and business services.
- Integrating with other tools: Sharing data and reporting with other solutions to create connected insights that enhance business value.
- Providing reporting and analytics: Offering out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, the ability to create custom reports, or both. Nice-to-have features are generative AI-powered report creation, the ability to port information to analytics of your choice, and export/import capabilities for reports team members have already created.
- Ensuring scalability: Ensuring your solution will scale with growth–across assets, resource types, and a larger number of data centres. Inventory management is only as good as the data it collects.
Many organizations are governed by internal, customer, and regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, that govern data privacy, security, and sovereignty. As a result, your DCIM solution should create visibility into physical and logical environments, with the ability to monitor, manage, and control configurations and access, as well as audit and report on processes.
- Enabling monitoring and alerts: Providing near-real-time updates so you can promptly address issues or report on new configurations or devices in an environment.
- Providing visualization and floor planning: Visualizing who has access to components and cabling across assets and verifying that they have redundant power, which is essential for mission-critical workloads.
- Ensuring security and compliance management: Delivering built-in rule sets, reports, and visualizations for specific regulatory and governance standards.
- Integrating with other tools: Integrating with audit, log monitoring, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions for starters. If your DCIM tool provides an open API, you can take advantage of online databases and lists that continually update asset information.
- Providing reporting and analytics: Reporting on aggregated asset class and resource information and basic configuration information like firmware, operating systems, and the “last login” to meet some security/risk needs.
If you’re seeking to control costs or optimize current investments, you’ll want to ensure your DCIM solution supports:
- Managing and optimizing power consumption: Prioritizing power draw and balancing to ensure three-phase power isn’t wasted. Tie these metrics to resource utilization to analyze and justify power consumption.
- Planning capacity: Reporting free power drops, network connections, open rack space, and other metrics, such as virtualization and storage capacity.
- Integrating with other tools: Feeding DCIM data into financial operating (FinOps), IT service management (ITSM), and IT operations management (ITOM) tools to improve cross-functional processes.
- Delivering reporting and analytics: Aggregating and correlating data to drive cost and efficiency gains.
- Providing monitoring and alerts: Enabling holistic visibility and near-real-time insights so you can react faster to emerging issues and reduce disruptions.
- Enabling visualization and floor planning: Gaining rack elevation, wiring diagrams, and environmental factor data such as temperature/humidity to help optimize processes.
- Supporting disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC): Revealing all upstream and downstream dependencies, including hosts, network, storage, and applications, to meet DR, BC, and high availability requirements.
With these tips, you can choose a DCIM tool to meet critical business, technical, and operational requirements, supporting technology growth and performance and delivering more value to your organization.
