Guest Blog by William Bloomstein, Market Strategist for iTRACS
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) means many things to many people, depending on their short-term and long-range goals for the data center. For some, the immediate priority is reducing energy consumption and costs, contributing to the elimination of OPEX. For others, it's getting a better handle on space so they can optimize every square foot of their existing footprint, an important part of their strategy for reducing CAPEX. For still others, it's getting control over their IT asset inventory – what they have and where it is on the floor. Here, data center owners and operators around the world agree on a core tenant of IT asset management:
Any DCIM solution worth its salt has to have a strong asset tracking and location capability that can find, identify, and confirm the location of every asset on the floor.
This is where the DCIM partnership of iTRACS and RF Code shines.
You can't manage what you can't find.
It may not be as bad as worrying about the whereabouts of a teenager at night, but tracking down your servers and other IT assets is vital for data centers seeking firm control over their asset portfolio. It reduces time spent on asset management by your IT staff, accelerates audits, helps with lease management, and streamlines tech refresh and other data center initiatives.
So let me ask you this:
Do you know where all of your servers are located, what they are doing, and why they are there? And HOW do you know that you, indeed, know?
If you can't answer both of these questions with confidence, you need a joint DCIM solution from iTRACS and RF Code. Let me explain ...
There are two types of assets on the floor that commonly go undetected and/or unauthorized, jeopardizing the efficiency and well-being of your operation:
- Misplaced Assets. These are older "forgotten" assets sitting in your racks without your knowledge or control (out of your line of sight). You don't even know they are still hanging around. Perhaps the Line of Business removed its applications and left the physical servers to sit there uselessly, forgotten. Or the boxes' leases expired but no one did anything about it. In any event, these assets are the "lost children" of the IT portfolio. And if you don't asset-tag them, they may sit on your racks, unseen, needlessly consuming power and space, forever.
- Misinstalled Assets. These are assets that are installed in the wrong location but you may not know it until it's too late and your IT services are negatively impacted! This often occurs in critical facilities where servers must be deployed or relocated fast, outside the normal working practices. In situations like this, assets can be inadvertantly misinstalled in the wrong racks. But there's no way for you to KNOW that a mistake has been made unless you have an asset tracking solution like iTRACS with RF Code. Without asset tracking, you may remain in the dark about these assets until it's too late and the complaints about poor or nonexistent service roll in. Not a pleasant place to find yourself.
Unauthorized assets can wreak havoc on your floor ...
These problem assets can:
- Consume power without delivering quantifiable value back to the Business – under-utilized or literally unused
- Take up valuable rack space for no purpose
- Draw in network services for no purpose
- Delay time-to-service (misinstalled servers), costing the Business in lost transactions, customer goodwill, revenue, and profitability
- Potentially jeopardize availability (misinstalled assets), creating technical issues that can reverberate across the physical ecosystem
- Waste money - both OPEX and CAPEX
Fortunately, there is an answer – DCIM featuring the iTRACS Converged Physical Infrastructure Management® (CPIM®) software suite with RF Code's real-time asset data inside.
Use DCIM to run a more efficient data center operation with tighter reins over your asset portfolio
Working together in a powerful DCIM partnership, iTRACS and RF Code can help make your rogue assets go away. Integration with RF Code lets iTRACS CPIM® users collect, manage, and analyze asset location information captured directly from RF Code's RFID sensors. RF Code's real-time asset location data – analyzed and visualized in iTRACS' award-winning DCIM management platform – lets users confirm the location of every asset in their portfolio, manage physical moves/adds/changes with 100% confidence, and conduct other asset management tasks over the lifecycle of their equipment. The sensors cannot lie. So rogue assets can no longer hide.
iTRACS and RF Code - the dream team in DCIM
Scenario: You need to add a bunch of new servers as fast as possible and you'd better do the install right the first time, since there's no margin for error when revenue is at stake. You need to make sure your technicians physically install the right servers in the right racks. The last thing you need are misplaced servers disrupting the environment and delaying services to the business. Watch this brief demo to see how iTRACS and RF Code are collaborating to help ensure that your assets are always where they're supposed to be.
