Top 10 Best Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Software

DCIMs can bring major benefits to a Data Center Manager. Those benefits include time savings, staff productivity, and overall cost-savings. Data Centers have increased in size, density, and complexity over the years and managers needs easier solutions to improve their staff’s efficiency, extend lifecycles of their physical assets, and most importantly ensure uptime.

Below is our list of 10 Benefits we think are important features of a DCIM:

Instantaneous visual and textual information on data center assets
Centralized data base enables accurate record keeping and process
Quickly model and allocate space for new assets with capacity management
Manage power and network connectivity in a single location
Fully integrated workflow management with change management
Constant power monitoring with alerts before circuits fail
Quickly determine how much power is being consumed and how much is available
Identification of environmental hot spots with thresholds and alerts
Knowing whether you are overcooling or wasting energy
Intelligent PUE analytics and reporting to assist with management decision making

What Makes up a DCIM Solution?

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is a powerful tool you can implement in your data center to help you better manage all aspects of your data center. But why do you need one?

DCIM solutions can answer all these important questions below.

Asset Management
- What assets do I have in my data center?
- How are they connected?
- Who owns the equipment?
Capacity Management
- How much space, power, cooling and connectivity do I have?
- Where are the best places to deploy new equipment?
Change Management / Workflow
- How do I manage the workload?
- Who does the work?
- Is there a workflow process for my staff?
Power Management
- What is being consumed?
- How much power is available?
- How can I ensure availability and uptime?
Environmental Management
- How can I manage hot spots in my data center?
- Am I overcooling my data center?
- How can I maintain a safe environment for my data center assets?
- Do I have assets not being utilized that I can remove to recover space, power, cooling, etc. (Note: Many customers have approximately 30% of assets that are not being utilized).
Energy Management
- How can I save energy and cost?
How much am I spending on energy?
Who is using the most energy and who is meeting our energy-saving goals?
Reporting
- Reports available with the click of a button with details of the data center capacity and productivity that supports executive and operations level information allowing to make proactive business decisions

Nearly every data center manager needs some subset of these questions answered and proper tools to do same. Remember there are few if any real “one size fits all” solutions for all these questions, so the next questions is which questions are my priorities and what is the most efficient tool to help me answer and maintain that information.

WHEN IS A GOOD TIME TO CONSIDER NEW DCIM TOOLS?

We should always be evaluating the tools we use and their effectiveness in our environment, as well as maintain an understanding of new tools that become available on the market and their capabilities. The data center continues to evolve as a lifeline for any corporation and is a very costly enterprise which is even more reason that companies should be looking for ways to make their data centers and associated processes more efficient.

When Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools came on the market, they were a way of keeping information in a repository for facility related infrastructure (power, cooling and space) and then in time added 3-phase power, networking, work-flow and reporting capabilities. These tools have evolved to also include work-flow, enhanced reporting, productivity metrics, and real time power monitoring, which in turn have brought the IT and facilities organizations closer together over the past few years. Most of the tools on the market attempt to do too much and only do a handful of tasks well; very few are used to their full capability.

To that end you should evaluate what you seek to accomplish when purchasing a DCIM solution and have a clear understanding of what it is going to take to implement and maintain it. The cost of implementation could be up to 30% to 50% of the original software purchase price and to implement and maintain a tool of this type can sometimes take months. None of it will work without fully understanding what your goals are and ensuring you have the process and resources to support it long term.

Without a good inventory process that ensures your inventory is updated and accurate these tools will have minimal impact. For most implementations the lack of a solid inventory and strong process in place are reasons why these tools fail in the workplace. Many data center managers would love to create a virtual model of their environment before physically placing anything in them and in turn understand the impact on space, power and cooling but it’s not possible without having the asset inventory in place and a strong process to support this.

[block_reclama1]

Top 10 Best Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Software:

SUNBIRDDCIM

Sunbird is among the most reputed DCIM companies offering data center infrastructure management software, cable management system, infrastructure design and optimization services.

SUNBIRDDCIM

OPENDCIM

openDCIM, a free, web based Data Center Infrastructure Management application. DCIM means many different things to many different people, and there is a multitude of commercial applications available. openDCIM does not contend to be a function by function replacement for commercial applications.