Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) has been described as the convergence between facilities management, IT management, and automation. Because today's capacity to monitor and analyze every aspect of a data center is becoming more cost-effective, DCIM is quickly rising as an industry best practice.
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DCIM makes it possible to have a single view for monitoring and understanding non-compute resources like energy, cooling, and lighting, as well as compute resources like the IT equipment supporting business functions.
Gartner has defined DCIM as tools used to “monitor, measure, manage and/or control data center utilization and energy consumption of all IT-related equipment.”
While data center management is the set of strategies and techniques administrators develop and use to operate their IT facilities, DCIM most often refers to the software tools and solutions that managers can rely on to help visualize and manage their critical assets. Data center infrastructure itself is the core physical or hardware-based resources and components – including all IT infrastructure devices, equipment, and technologies – that comprise a data center and includes any of the following components:
Learn More: Is Your Enterprise Ready for DCIM?
Enterprise DCIM solutions are exceptionally precise and provide monitoring granularity, even down to a specific port on a particular rack server in a sea of servers, allowing for total visibility and control over everything in a data center. DCIM software helps managers optimize their IT facility performance and reduces energy consumption and costs. To this end, four key areas that DCIM impacts are:
Insights from DCIM tools are beneficial in every phase of data center management — planning, design, operations, monitoring, and predictive analytics. DCIM software offers administrators the following benefits:
Learn more about the advantages of DCIM software, and turn data center complexity into insightful visualizations.
Every business needs computing equipment to run its web applications, offer services to customers, sell products, or run internal applications for accounts, human resources, and operations management. As the business grows and IT operations increase, the scale and amount of required equipment also increases exponentially. Equipment that is distributed across several branches and locations is hard to maintain. Instead, companies use data centers to bring their devices to a central location and manage it cost effectively. Instead of keeping it on premises, they can also use third-party data centers.
Data centers bring several benefits, such as:
Data centers first emerged in the early s, when computer hardware was complex to operate and maintain. Early computer systems required many large components that operators had to connect with many cables. They also consumed a large amount of power and required cooling to prevent overheating. To manage these computers, called mainframes, companies typically placed all the hardware in a single room, called a data center. Every company invested in and maintained its own data center facility.
Over time, innovations in hardware technology reduced the size and power requirements of computers. However, at the same time, IT systems became more complex, such as in the following ways:
Modern data center design evolved to better manage IT complexity. Companies used data centers to store physical infrastructure in a central location that they could access from anywhere. With the emergence of cloud computing, third-party companies manage and maintain data centers and offer infrastructure as a service to other organizations. As the world’s leading cloud services provider, AWS has created innovative cloud data centers around the globe.
Most enterprise data center infrastructure falls into three broad categories:
Also, data center equipment includes support infrastructure like power systems, which help the main equipment function effectively.
Computing resources include several types of servers with varying internal memory, processing power, and other specifications. We give some examples below.
Rack servers have a flat, rectangular design, and you can stack them in racks or shelves in a server cabinet. The cabinet has special features like mesh doors, sliding shelves, and space for other data center resources like cables and fans.
A blade server is a modular device and you can stack multiple servers in a smaller area. The server itself is physically thin and typically only has memory, CPUs, integrated network controllers, and some built-in storage drives. You can slide multiple servers into a storage unit called a chassis. The chassis facilitates any additional components that the servers inside it require. Blade servers take up less space than rack servers and offer higher processing speed, minimal wiring, and lower power consumption.
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The following are two types of data center storage systems.
Block storage devices like hard drives and solid-state drives store data in blocks and provide many terabytes of data capacity. Storage area networks (SANs) are storage units that contain several internal drives and act as large block storage systems.
File storage devices, like network-attached storage (NAS), can store a large volume of files. You can use them to create image and video archives.
A large number of networking devices, such as cables, switches, routers, and firewalls connect other data center components to each other and to end-user locations. They provide flawless data movement and connectivity across the system.
Data centers also contain these components:
These data center components support the main equipment so that you can use the data center facilities without interruption.
As data centers increased in size and complexity and began to store sensitive and critical information, governments and other organizations imposed regulations on them. The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) established four levels or standards that cover all aspects of data center design, including:
Similarly, the Uptime Institute established four tiers to compare site performance objectively and align infrastructure investments to business goals. We list the four data center tiers below.
A Tier I data center is the basic capacity level to support IT systems for an office setting and beyond. Some of the requirements for a Tier I facility include:
Tier I protects against service disruptions from human error but not against unexpected failure or outage. You can also expect an annual downtime of 29 hours in Tier I data centers.
Tier II facilities provide additional cooling components for better maintenance and safety against disruptions. For example, these data centers must have the following:
Although you can remove components from Tier II data centers without shutting them down, unexpected failures can affect the system. You can expect an annual downtime of 22 hours from a Tier II data center.
Tier III data centers provide greater data redundancy, and you can maintain or replace equipment without system shutdown. They also implement redundancy on support systems like power and cooling units to guarantee only 1.6 hours of annual downtime.
Tier IV data centers contain several physically isolated systems to avoid disruption from both planned and unplanned events. They are completely fault-tolerant with fully redundant systems and can guarantee a downtime of only 26 minutes each year.
You can choose from many types of data center services, depending on your requirements.
On-premises data centers are fully owned company data centers that store sensitive data and critical applications for that company. You set up the data center, manage its ongoing operations, and purchase and maintain the equipment.
Colocation facilities are large data center facilities in which you can rent space to store your servers, racks, and other computing hardware. The colocation center typically provides security and support infrastructure such as cooling and network bandwidth.
In a cloud data center, you can rent both space and infrastructure. Cloud providers maintain large data centers with full security and compliance. You can access this infrastructure by using different services that give you more flexibility in usage and payment.
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