In my last blog entry I touched on the impact staffing costs have on data center efficiency, especially when viewed from a CapEx/OpEx perspective. Simply put, skilled people -- and their time -- cost money. Quite a bit of it, in fact. And as we look at measuring overall data center efficiency from a business value perspective, it is clear that optimized data center staffing can have a very noticeableimpact on the bottom line.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the best way to reduce OpEx is to just fire the data center staff. Obviously, staff are needed to ensure that the data center is running efficently and also to address problems quickly when they arise. So increasing the efficiency of a data center's personnel-related expenditures isn't so much a question of removing personnel so that you lower salary-related costs, but rather making sure that the personnel you have are being used in the most efficient ways possible.
One thing we hear from IT organizations again and again is that instead of providing the vital technical support they are trained for, IT personnel often spend days, even weeks, performing data collection tasks that have little or nothing to do with their areas of expertise. Every year thousands of hours of valuable data center staff time is wasted by the time consuming manual processes required to perform periodic inventories, locate missing equipment, ensure efficient capacity planning and so forth. While these hours of effort are necessary from an operational/compliance standpoint, they underutilize the expertise and training of IT staff. It's hard to imagine a less efficent use of a data center's personnel.
Fully automating inventory and asset tracking technology like the active RFID-powered solutions provided by RF Code effectively eliminate the manual processes involved in managing assets in the data center, letting IT and data center management to recover these wasted hours and instead invest them in productive IT activities that directly affect the data center's ability to provide useful work and services to the organization in the most efficient way possible.
Furthermore, our automated solution for performing periodic audits of IT equipment supplies real-time inventory and physical location data for an organization’s IT assets, providing an efficient and cost-effective method of obtaining the critical asset tracking information an organization needs to:
- Maintain audit and regulatory compliance;
- Have 100 percent inventory accuracy and visibility;
- Ensure that IT resources are used most productively; and,
- Reduce CapEx and OpEe by automating the ability to have accurate asset visibility without incurring manual costs.
For a deeper look at the ways in which automated asset management processes directly impact the overall efficiency of your data center, take a look at our whitepaper "Achieving ROI through Automated Physical IT Asset Tracking." Or register for one of our interactive live demos and take a look at our active RFID-powered asset tracking and environmental monitoring solutions for yourself.
