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
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