A new dawn for DCIM?

As one of the United States’ founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin may not be the most contemporary of reference points but his sage appraisal of the fragility of social standing still holds plenty of stock today.

Good news for those associated with unblemished brands, damning for those in the business of Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) – a much-maligned capability that has a decade’s worth of disappointment, rather than a single blot, on its copybook.

Mis-marketed, mis-sold and misunderstood, DCIM is frequently spoken of in derisory terms by industry insiders as a consequence of a substantial legacy of ineffective deployments, despite the concept being based on sound principles. 

There is, however, a very real requirement for a Lazarus-style reputational recovery – for the loathed to become loved and mocked to become marvelled. 

Data centres – and the sprawling IT estates they house – are becoming increasingly complex and hybrid in nature, which makes their effective management a feat far beyond the means of mere spreadsheets and asset registers.

The coronavirus pandemic has also given cause to reconsider the merits of deploying DCIM systems.

With sites sealed due to social-distancing measures and major restrictions on travel put in place during lockdowns, some data centres were not readily accessible to the humans carrying clipboards and manual management tools which are often relied on to sustain the healthy operations of facilities and cabling infrastructure. 

Given the direction of travel within the sector is very much towards dark sites and the Edge, improved technology will soon be a necessity rather than a nice to have. Operators will need remote access to a single source of truth that considers the management, connectivity and automation of every element of the data centre ecosystem.

Whether or not reputations can be repaired remains to be seen, but stereotypes can shift and suppliers of fit-for-purpose DCIM systems should be buoyed by the example of a sector driving data centre capacity extension. 

Rewind to the start of the current century and the term “gamer” conjured images of teenagers shunning natural light and social interaction in favour of fervent button bashing in their bedrooms. 

Today, time in front of a console is as far removed as possible from being a solitary experience with people joining online games to actively mix with a global family of 2.8 billion people and powering an industry worth more than $175 billion. 

Gaming has become a social monster and is community driven to the extent that people even enjoy watching others play – as evidenced by the professionalisation of e-sports and the millions who tune in to watch live-streamed finals. 

Significant advancements in technology, specifically the sophistication of computer networks and speed of sharing data, have been at the spearhead of this reinvention and DCIM can follow suit.

There are now new players in the game with the ability to leapfrog legacy systems in terms of providing cheaper and easier to install systems that are dramatically less resource intensive from the human perspective.

The penny has also dropped that the “management” element of the DCIM monitor is critical and there is a general acceptance that tools which simply monitor are continuing to miss the point. 

Optimising a data centre’s performance, mitigating downtime, driving efficiencies and planning for the future all require the mining of multiple data sets for the benefit of multiple stakeholders and consequently savvy suppliers, such as automation specialist RiT Tech, have brought interoperability to the fore. 

An effective DCIM needs to act as the glue to bind a data centre’s many component parts and therefore augment – and not replace – specialist tools already in place through smart but quick to configure APIs. 

Ultimately, perceptions will only be changed through positive experiences and the recent demise of Vertiv’s Trellis DCIM demonstrates the scale of the challenge at hand.

RiT Tech, however, remains undeterred from its mission to distance itself from DCIM’s dark past and plans to define a brighter future with its next-generation solution, XpedITe.

While Franklin’s words continue to ring true, RiT Tech have also noted those of Amazon founder and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos… “you earn reputation by trying to do hard things well”.