Why 360 degree intelligence is needed to drive data center efficiencies

Jeff Safovich, CTO at RiT Tech, shares his roadmap for revolutionising infrastructure management

For the modern-day driver, the concept of consulting a road atlas ahead of setting off on a journey must seem as absurd as the notion that pay phones were once the only means of communicating while on the move.

In the world of motoring, physical maps are proverbial dinosaurs – archaic tools rendered extinct by the emergence of the satellite navigation systems that are now as common to cars as seatbelts.

After a somewhat bumpy start in the 1990s, these digital navigators have become essential travel aids, relied upon to not only plan routes and deliver directions but to serve as a source of up-to-the-second traffic information.

Humans’ trust in the technology has grown as it has matured and broadened its bandwidth in respect of the real-world data it consumes and considers. No longer concerned with merely mapping motorways and city streets, these in-car companions process all available elements – from accident and road closure reports to toll charges, speed limits and the positioning of police enforcement cameras.

Such a broad view brings intelligence and, in turn, delivers the efficiencies we now largely take for granted. Sophisticated sat-nav systems adjust to live scenarios and driver habits, continually recalculating and tailoring the guidance they afford those behind the wheel to optimise the costs, comfort and duration of a journey.

Car manufacturers’ warm embrace of a universal approach to assimilating data is also delivering unprecedented protection to those taking to the roads. Lane keeping aids, external cameras, cloud-based communication, and collision avoidance and blind spot information systems all help improve safety by exploiting data that could – quite literally – impact on the wellbeing of drivers and passengers.

As demonstrated by the motoring industry, knowing all there is to know can bring clear and obvious benefits, which is why at RiT Tech we are set on accelerating the adoption of Universal Intelligent Infrastructure Management (UIIM) within data centres.

Just as city centre road networks have become increasingly busy and complex, so too have the environments charged with maintaining the world’s flow of digital traffic and ‘garaging’ the vast volumes of data generated by governments, businesses and society as a whole.

Technicians armed with little more than a computer spreadsheet with which to register assets, monitor and plan migrations and expansions and optimise operations are the data centre sector’s equivalent of paper maps – a resource once relied on but frankly no longer, if truly ever, fit-for-purpose.

A universal approach to data gathering is needed to eradicate previous blind spots and RiT Tech’s XpediTe has a thirst for knowledge that far surpasses that of a sat-nav. 

The innovative toolset integrates and interrogates its surroundings, no matter how expansive; retrieving both historical and current information from physical assets and legacy systems; and creates a comprehensive picture of a data centre’s topology, charting the role of every asset and its inter-dependencies. 

Once equipped with this universal understanding of a facility, be it an enterprise, edge, colocation or geographically-dispersed operation, XpedITe is empowered to impart its intellect and is a dependable co-driver that can be relied on to provide a federated, real-time view of a data centre’s direction of travel.

Aside from navigating away from any network crashes and unnecessary downtime, this single source of truth of everything from asset availability and resource utilisation to connectivity and the health of IT components guides data centre managers towards optimal performance.

UIIM’s true value, however, lies in its ability to read the road ahead. It can determine provisioning for new assets and services at lightning quick speeds, assess the risks and rewards of strategic decisions and major network changes and produce automated work orders that signpost engineers directly to their required destinations. 

Advancing autonomy in data centres is a logical next gear and XpediTE, our UIIM solution, offers operators a fast lane to providing a super-efficient service while helping to reduce total cost of ownership.

Designed by RiT Tech to empower customers to take command of their own destiny it can also, like the state-of-the-art systems in today’s vehicles, be trusted. While we are breaking new ground in the field of data centre autonomy, it is territory we are comfortable with having pioneered the use of AIM (Automated Infrastructure Management), which forms part of ISO/IEC 18598.