Ian Murphy, Published
RF Code has announced CENTERScape Cloud which it describes as: “a cloud-based operational intelligence solution for small and medium-sized data centers.” Reading through the launch materials, the idea is that rather than develop their own data centre management tools, small to medium sized data centres can utilise a cloud-based solution instead.
Using the cloud to manage the cloud makes a lot of sense. One of the big challenges for data centre owners has always been how to do deep asset management and combine that with other things such as environmental systems and capacity planning. Industry attempts to resolve this with DCIM, ITSM and BMS solutions have had some success but none of them can claim universal success.
The solutions that are out there are often supplied by different companies. Some of the data centre infrastructure vendors have built their own solutions to address part of the problem such as environmental monitoring and asset management. Others have tried to integrate with change and service level management tools with limited success. Part of the challenge of all of this has been security inside the data centre.
This has often left data centre owners with incomplete solutions. While some vendors have done a lot of work to deliver integration with other products many have been less willing to invest. The majority have delivered APIs of differing quality hoping to attract third-party developers to do the integration for them. In too many cases, however, IT departments have either had to roll their own solution using the APIs or else resort to incompatible systems and a lot of data import and export routines.
