Data centers are always evolving – equipment can move in and out, and around, on a daily basis. Do you know what equipment is in your data center right now? What equipment is sitting on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be provisioned? And which pieces are nearing the end of their useful life?

Gone are the days of counting your data center equipment by hand – walking the floor, stopping at each rack, and entering the data into a spreadsheet or a diagram, that was (maybe!) reviewed again the next year. Good riddance to the time-consuming, error prone, asynchronous manual process of checking each piece of equipment and its barcode (if you remembered to give it one when it came into the data center). This old-fashioned way of managing assets can result in a 15% annual inventory inaccuracy. Active RFID monitoring technology is the answer.

Without an accurate and up-to-date count of each type, and location, of equipment in your data center – servers, storage, networking equipment – it’s easy to lose track of the available and un-provisioned equipment you already own that is ready to be put into service, and when you updated equipment or where it was moved to.

Lack of an accurate inventory makes it hard to keep up with compliance with privacy, security, and controls regulations when you cannot supply an up-to-date equipment listing. And even without specific regulations in play, it’s a challenge to maintain a secure facility when you can’t immediately recognize if a piece of equipment has been moved out the facility – either with or without permission.

On top of all that, an incomplete inventory listing means you can very easily spend more money than necessary by buying equipment you don’t really need because you already own it.

You can eliminate these issues by monitoring your assets via active RFID technology. The benefits of this technology for an accurate, real-time inventory of your data center assets:

• Visibility into all your data center assets
• Maximum return on investment by fully using all the equipment you purchase
• Audit trail of all IT equipment –know at any given time what resources are available and where they are
• Management of equipment throughout the entire lifecycle
• Compliance with industry security-related regulations
• Financial savings through avoiding overprovisioning and inefficient use of staff time

Want to learn more? Download this eBook  and learn how real-time monitoring, capacity planning and predictive analysis technologies improve data center agility and efficiency, ensuring higher performance at a lower cost.