An interview with co-location provider CyrusOne has created quite a stir in the data center industry recently. The company’s VP for Data Center Systems and Security, Amaya Souarez, posed the question — is your DCIM provider open enough?
CyrusOne doesn’t believe so, and if you assess many of the industry’s solution providers it is a claim that appears to be correct. One of Souarez’s main complaints is the fact that DCIM providers, and she names several, are “falling down,” because she cannot “extract data out of these systems,” easily.
A flexible, open-architected framework with integration possibilities would solve that issue. This is a competitive differentiator we make very clear in our customer success stories, the most compelling of which is Vodafone's deployment of RF Code.
Souarez continues, “The ability to easily extract out data is super important, but it hasn’t been embraced fully by the data center industry quite yet.” This point is particularly true and it is why we often challenge potential customers to ask their existing DCIM providers to prove the ROI and efficiency claims they have been sold on. This should be the starting point of any investment decision.
Colocating Similar Views
The need for tangible evidence is also occurring within the colocation industry itself, although more around the concept of operational visibility. An increasing number of colocation providers now find that their customers expect access to executive dashboards that show the providers are adhering to their SLA conditions.
This highlights the value of selecting a DCIM provider that presents its data in a way that is useful and applicable to all levels of management and every business unit, particularly finance. CA Technologies’ Dhesi Ananchaperumal echoes this view in his article, The Four Pillars of DCIM Integration.
He states, “Data: This is paramount, and is usually the first area to tackle. For DCIM to deliver better visibility of data center operations and resources, organizations need to be able to integrate data from different platforms and in different formats.”
After all, your CFO is unlikely to be happy when the promised savings from outsourcing data center capacity fail to materialize or, even more concerning, when your own facility fails because your DCIM suite isn’t reporting on the correct data source that enables informed decision-marking.
Do you feel your DCIM provider is open enough? Let us know in the comments below.
