Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 32 | Page 79

t cht lk Herman Chan, President at Sunbird Software An enterprise dashboard displays real-time power and environmental health, trends, events and alerts for all sites in a single pane of glass with the ability to drill down for more granular cabinet-level metrics. Advanced warning of issues such as hot spot formation, power capacity limitations, and loss of redundancy allows you to take action to prevent downtime. DCIM software combined with remote power control on intelligent rack PDUs lets you switch devices on or off or power cycle them without the need for an on-site technician to reboot servers and restore them to service. • Remotely manage all assets and connections across the entire data centre deployment. As data centres become more complex and distributed, more data centre managers are tasked to remotely manage multiple sites and business applications. In a modern data centre environment, maintaining an accurate inventory of all your assets across all sites requires a tool that provides real-time views of all your physical data centre infrastructure. DCIM provides business intelligence and analytics on metrics such as asset count by location, hosts per application and asset cost by location which helps you understand which applications require the most resources and where you can increase efficiency. DCIM also lets you easily understand how assets are physically connected via visual circuit traces to help you avoid overloaded circuits, decrease latency, perform impact analysis and quickly troubleshoot connections to reduce downtime. • Improve collaboration and productivity of remote workers. With most data centre employees now working from home, it’s more important than ever for data centre teams to break “ DATA CENTRE PROFESSIONALS NEED A COMPLETE REMOTE DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT TOOLKIT WITH DCIM TO BRIDGE INFORMATION ACROSS ORGANISATIONAL DOMAINS. down organisational silos and share a single source of truth via common views of dashboards and reports that are updated and visible in real time. A modern, second-generation DCIM solution will enable data-driven collaboration of remote workers with business intelligence dashboards that can be created, edited and securely shared with respect to granular, role-based access controls. You can manage consistent KPIs across your functional teams with preconfigured widgets and reports for every data centre scenario. Categorise all assets in your data centre and easily save and share asset and site views with the various groups in your organisation, whether server, network, storage or infrastructure teams, ensuring a common approach and process for remote management of all equipment. • Ensure physical security of data centres. DCIM software has user reporting, audit logs, physical cabinet lock management and surveillance feeds to allow you to monitor and manage who has access to different areas of your data centre. You can even remotely unlock cabinet doors for remote hands to service equipment while keeping an eye on them with remote in-rack camera feeds. The ‘new normal’ may present a unique set of challenges, but the objectives remain the same: improve uptime, utilisation and productivity. Now more than ever, data centre professionals need a complete remote data centre management toolkit with DCIM to bridge information across organisational domains including operations, facilities and IT, and have the information they need to manage all physical, virtual and logical data centre assets; quickly plan and provision new equipment; accurately make changes as needed; improve data centre design; increase operational efficiency and confidently plan capacity for future growth while increasing utilisation of existing assets. • www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 79