Double delight

Universal Intelligent Infrastructure Management (UIIM) use case – XpedITe DCIM integration with RFCODE at DISCOUNT BANK in Israel.

Jeff Safovich, RiT Tech’s chief technology officer, on the advantages of welcoming ‘twins’ into your family.

For those responsible for monitoring the vital signs, lifecycle and ongoing operations of a data center, the birth of digital twin technology has been cause for significant celebration. 

It is a new arrival to the world of business that, while still in its infancy, boasts plenty of promise. 

The concept of creating a real-time virtual representation of a real-world physical system or process can certainly be a game changer in the delivery of operational effectiveness and efficiency. By constantly collecting, exchanging and analyzing data, a digital twin can simulate and predict the behaviours and reactions of its physical sibling – empowering organisations to test products and procedures and, in turn, make major strategic decisions with minimal risk. 

However, for the technology to truly come of age, its mapping of the physical domain must be precise for it to present high-fidelity visualisations – no easy task if the environment being replicated is as complex and laden with interdependencies as a data center. 

The hi-tech homes to networking ports are dynamic and ever-evolving, and every addition, move or change to assets can have a knock-on effect, impacting on the space, power and cooling available to other entities. 

Consequently, in the field of data centers, digital twin technology is far from mature, but some significant baby steps have already been taken. 

Take, for example, RiT Tech’s recent integration of XpedITe, our next-generation Data Center Infrastructure Management tool, with RFCODE – a radio-frequency (RF) identification system – which was done at the request of Israel Discount Bank.  

By harnessing the information from this readily available, affordable and popular means of recording and tracking objects, and assimilating it alongside data feeds from across an operation’s ‘grey space’ (data center facility management) and ‘white space’ (data center IT management), XpedITe can generate a highly accurate representation of every asset. 

Aside from providing certainty on current configurations and flagging any undocumented devices, this precision coupling of the physical and digital brings a greater degree of automation to the planning and implementation of new components. 

Working in tandem with enterprise resource planning software (ERP), configuration management databases (CMDB) and building management systems (BMS), the innovative integration can reserve and allocate ID codes to incoming assets and serve as a guide to their installation; automatically confirming when a deployment is complete and adding the new device to its watch list. 

It can then raise an alert if a device is moved or decommissioned and immediately identify its new location. Such knowledge is crucial to any remotely operated or edge sites, particularly those reliant on third-party maintenance. 

Representing an advancement in infrastructure management and significant addition to RiT Tech’s growing pool of integration adapters, XpedITe’s adoption and utilisation of RF ID technology make the prospect of data centers creating identical twins a distinct possibility. 

And from a company perspective, it is another sign that our own creation is growing up fast and our aspirations for it to become a Universal Intelligent Infrastructure Management are on track. XpedITe is set on delivering an indistinguishable digital mirror image of any given infrastructure, and automagically optimising a data center’s operational, maintenance and control processes.

About the author

With 25 years+ technology products experience, Jeff co-founded three tech start-ups, including SphereUp which was acquired and Zoomd which went public in 2019 and led a development group at Comverse. Since joining RiT Tech, Jeff has been transformational in taking DCIM to new heights with the introduction of the Universal Intelligent Infrastructure Management (UIIM) concept.