Intelligent Data Centres Issue 18 | Page 40

EXPERT OPINION Top use cases for remote data centre management with DCIM software Data centre managers are under more pressure than ever and need tools to provide complete visibility across the whole facility. Herman Chan, President at Sunbird Software, tells us why infrastructure teams should consider DCIM software to help them achieve their core objectives of improving uptime, utilisation and productivity. he COVID-19 pandemic has driven all interaction with T the outside world online, causing a dramatic spike in the utilisation of server compute, storage and network resources, and data centre managers have been tasked to continue providing the services the world desperately needs, quickly expanding capacity while also maintaining uptime and high availability. To make this even more challenging, public health guidelines and shelter-inplace orders have required data centre managers to reduce the number of people in the data centre to the bare minimum. In this ‘new normal’, remote data centre management tools have provided total visibility into global data centre footprints from anywhere at any time. Even before the pandemic, remote data centre management was a trending topic due to trends such as moving to colocation or implementing Edge Computing, where many remote sites need to be centrally managed. With COVID-19, remote data centre management is now an absolute necessity to maintain uptime and Business Continuity while reducing the staff required to go on-site. Data centre professionals now need to leverage a wide range of technologies in their remote data centre management toolkit such as intelligent PDUs, KVM over IP switches, serial console servers, baseboard management controllers, cloud monitoring, IT systems monitoring, IT service management (ITSM), building management (BMS) and electrical power management (EPMS). But to complete the remote data centre management toolkit and bridge information across organisational domains, all data centre managers must have Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. 40 Issue 18 www.intelligentdatacentres.com