Considering the steep levels of attrition prevailing at present and the need to retain intellectual property pertaining to the data center, automating key portions of the data center is becoming increasingly critical to maintain productivity. This can be a grave concern if the IT management does not take adequate steps to secure this side of the data centre. Also, it is becoming evident that utilizing KPI-based dashboards is vital core to bridging knowledge gaps and fostering collaboration between key stakeholders.
To shed more light on this subject and to help Indian CIOs become aware of global best practices exercised in data center management, APC by Schneider Electric and CIO magazine conducted an interaction with Soeren B. Jensen, VP, Enterprise Management and Software at APC by Schneider Electric.
Although IT practices may be different, the data center challenges are the same throughout the world. Jensen highlighted that fact using statistics presented by leading analyst firms. According to these findings, data center space and power and/or cooling continue to be on top of the table, followed by adoption of cloud computing, modernization of legacy applications, finding and/or retaining IT talent and virtualization.
With the continuous evolution of the CIO’s role in an organization, the unwritten norm now is that IT leaders must get into the management’s shoes before making any decision or implementation, and gauge how their strategy would benefit or affect business. Doing so will help CIOs find answers to the management’s questions regarding effective measurement of power utilization in data centers, overall efficiency rating and comparison with industry standards, gains achieved and ways to minimize energy consumption and costs. IT leaders can be sure they are on the right track if they know these answers and strategize accordingly. Smart Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools deliver full insights into such data that can help in planning and optimizing utilization of actual infrastructure capacities.
In one way, IT-facility management acts as the foundation for comprehensive DCIM. With smart software tools, organizations can now easily optimize energy consumption, lower TCO, reduce human errors, streamline workflow and enable virtualization by bridging IT’s demand and facility’s supply.
On the other hand, emerging technology trends are creating complex and dynamic data center environments that need to be managed efficiently. Besides this rapid evolution, other factors - such as high availability, resilience, need for green solutions, cloud computing, and virtualization, are driving the need for proper DCIM. Jensen later explained how Schneider Electric can help in this process. He said, “One of Schneider Electric’s important goals is to dramatically simplify the process of designing, deploying and operating the world’s most predictable, dense and efficient data centers.” He added that organizations must lay more emphasis on making incremental changes rather than on a long-term strategy when it comes to DCIM.
StruxureWare Operations Platform from APC by Schneider Electric allows C-level executives, data center managers and facility managers to have complete visibility and control over their data center’s daily operation and efficiencies. Its fully integrated workflow management allows for easy tracking and executing moves, add ons and changes of equipment in the data center.
StruxureWare is a new level of DCIM business intelligence that is vendor-neutral and provides a unified view and analysis of complex IT physical infrastructure and communicates with building, enterprise and network management systems to ensure quaity, energy and cost savings. It also aids in short and long term planning and provisioning of data center resources. Cost-analysis of energy use on a kW/h basis is available right down to the rack level for calculating energy consumption, costs and empowering charge back and efficient budgeting.
Jensen’s presentation was followed by another by Rohit Ambosta, VP and Head, ESG, Financial Technologies Ltd (FT). FT, a financial services company, caters to three different verticals: exchange, ecosystem and technology. High availability is critical to its entities such as MCX, MCX SX and Atom, and their data centers cannot afford to have downtimes during operation. They have a global presence - with servers in various locations including Mumbai, Singapore, Mauritius and Bahrain. The organization deployed Schneider Electric’s integrated DCIM suite, StruxureWare, which ensured them high availability and comprehensive data center management. The company achieved a DCIE (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency) of 83% and also won the DSCI Excellence Award. StruxureWare comes in different variants that cater to power grids, industries, data centers and buildings.
Ambosta then shared some best practices with CIOs. He said that organizations should constantly get real-time PUE (power usage of effectiveness) data for data centers, gather historical PUE info, and identify discrepancies between planned energy usage and actual usage to improve the efficiency of data centers.
