Increasing demand for computing and storage capacity drives the urgency to better assess IT needs, assets at hand and the infrastructure – space, power and cooling – to support it all. As businesses become more dependent on data centers, they are becoming more capital-intensive, energy-inten-sive and increasingly technical. The most adaptable, economically sustainable and best-managed data centers will be those where accurate, real-time and meaningful information about both IT and facilities assets and resources is continuously available. Having synthesized IT and facilities information will allow data center managers to better plan, forecast and manage capacity, efficiency and performance of their data centers, and eventually, to inform and drive automated systems within the data center.
Convergence of IT and facilities in the data center is driving the need for holistic solutions like Power Assure EM/4 that gives visibility and control to every aspect of the data center operations. Data center operators will benefit from EM/4 through its monitoring, analytics and automation capabilities that will result in increased power usage efficiency and reduced cost of ownership. Also, as data centers move from an always on to an on-demand operational model Power Assure EM/4’s advanced load shedding-shifting and power capping capabilities help reduce risk while increasing efficiency.
Power Assure EM/4 provides actionable, real-time and historical insight into power utilization and other key performance indicators (KPIs) for the data center, along with the means to analyze, optimize and automate energy efficiency while maintaining service levels.
EM/4 enables data center operators to:
• Gain real-time insight and intelligence into data center power, capacity, and performance
• Quickly visualize and identify inefficiencies in a comprehensive way
• Maximize use of available space and power
• Uncover hidden capacity
• Identify stranded power
• Extend the useful life of the data centers
• Cut on-going power consumption by an average of 50%
• Improve data center efficiency and utilization
• Automate responses to both expected and unexpected events
• Shift loads within and across sites
Data center operators need to make the capital investments that go into the power and cooling infrastructure, servers, storage and networking equipment. In order to better manage the whole data center ecosystem, a DCIM solution should be high on any commercial data center operators list. EM/4 is a comprehensive platform that offers integrated monitoring, analysis and automation of data center information and processes. With EM/4, data center managers can collect, synthesize and analyze the overwhelming amount of raw data available from facilities and IT equipment and then it into useful business information for making decisions in real time about improving the efficiency, capacity and performance of their data centers.
The biggest challenges for data center and IT managers.It is critical to get accurate, real-time data for effective decision-making. Using estimates or power consumption data provided by manufactures, for example, results in bad decisions that can be costly to in terms of both data center resources and utilization. Power Assure EM/4 collects all available capacity, performance, and energy information in the data center. Information is automatically discovered, collected each minute in real-time, and displayed collectively on a “single pane of glass.” The process is accurate, “frictionless” and provides high quality real-time data that allows data center operators to take analytics to the next level by linking real-time information with automated processes. Using EM/4’s automation capabilities, data center managers can automate existing processes and take quick action based on environmental changes or other trigger events in order to optimize performance, reliability and service levels.
Overcoming those challenges.
Operators need to make sure to bring in the appropriate metering and monitoring system into the data center so that you have visibility into your operations and can make most of DCIM solutions. Don’t forget “You can’t control what you don’t measure.”
Beyond the comparison of feature sets, operators should pay attention to select solutions that are not rip-replace but seamlessly integrate with the data center environment and that rely on an agentless architectures, like EM/4. Operators should also keep in mind the current trends in the market place that will be become standards in the future and consider choosing vendors whose product roadmaps are supportive of these trends.
**Brad Wurtz is the president and CEO of Power Assure. Brad’s 20-year career encompasses leadership roles in growing high technology companies in the global telecommunications and data center networking markets. Brad holds a BA from University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford University.
