FEATURE : DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
It offers extreme scalability that can handle millions of assets , billions of data points per day and thousands of users .
Other key pillars of second-generation DCIM are that it offers a full suite of capabilities for complete data center management , it is vendor-agnostic and works with virtually all third-party meters , sensors and software , and it leverages AI and Machine Learning capabilities to help optimize the data center .
WE LISTENED TO THESE PAIN POINTS AND WANTED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM . THAT ’ S WHEN SECOND-GENERATION DCIM WAS CREATED .
What tools can be integrated with second-generation DCIM ?
Second-generation DCIM features free APIs and customer-configurable connectors that enable integration with most other tools that have the appropriate APIs . This automation via integration eliminates double entry and reduces manual effort .
For example , integration with VMware helps data center managers easily identify and track server resources that support VMware virtual machines .
Integration with CMDBs such as ServiceNow , BMC Remedy , Ivanti / Cherwell and even homegrown systems is also popular .
Customers can exchange asset information between their DCIM tool and nearly any application that exposes their REST APIs . In many cases , this integration can become operational within an hour .
Leading data center professionals are also utilizing DevOps tools like Jenkins and Chef to integrate their DCIM software with applications like Jira , Slack and Splunk . They are automating everything from provisioning and orchestration to parts management to back-office processing . The possibilities are endless .
How do you quantify the RoI of second-generation DCIM ?
The most modern data center managers in the world use second-generation DCIM to maintain uptime , increase the efficiency of capacity utilization and improve the productivity of people . There are many ways to measure the Return-on-Investment ( RoI ) that they are seeing .
An exciting new type of integration is with ticketing systems . If an organization already has a ticketing application such as Jira or ServiceNow that they use to track their data center changes and incidents , they can now push those automatically to their DCIM to initiate the workflow process .
The tickets can also be automatically updated from their DCIM . This drives automation like automatically closing the ticket once the work is completed .
With their first-generation DCIM tool , Paddy Power Betfair had 5 – 10 users . After they switched to secondgeneration DCIM with greater reporting capabilities and data democratization , colleagues outside of the data center team wanted access to their system . Now , they claim 80 – 100 users , about a 900 % increase . The data center team is now further elevated in the organization .
Users of second-generation DCIM also report greatly improved accuracy of their assets and connectivity .
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