Cooking a nice meal is great for relaxing. But it can also add to the stress levels. There’s nothing worse than finding you are missing one vital ingredient, usually butter.

I predict this to be the year I buy a smart fridge. No more frantic dashes to the corner store for butter in 2015 – well, it’s a nice thought at least.

The fridge that can tell you what to buy at the grocery store has often been paraded as the poster child for the Internet of Things (IoT). But this is just one of many consumer and corporate applications: already everything from airplane parts and grape vines to toothbrushes and toys are connected.

This potential – and prevalence – has not gone unnoticed: 95 percent of C-level executives predict their company will be using the Internet of Things in three years time, with revenues being estimated at a staggering $1.2 to 14.4 trillion.

A date with data

The Internet of Things can’t exist without a myriad of connected devices; take sensors, for example. They capture the data that feeds nearly every app and use case. And this data can’t exist without storage and compute resources. You’ve guessed it; we’re back in the data center again. But is it ready?

By 2020, it’s predicted there will be more than 30 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things. That’s a lot of new data fighting for capacity with existing enterprise systems.

As Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, warns: “Internet of Things deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time…Data center operations and providers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management platforms that can include a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system approach of aligning IT and operational technology (OT) standards and communications protocols to be able to proactively provide the production facility to process the Internet of Things data points based on the priorities and the business needs.”

As well as helping organizations ascertain if they have sufficient data center capacity to cope with the Internet of Things revolution, DCIM solutions can also ensure that capacity – and other resources – are used as effectively as possible.

Visualize the future

In the rush to cope with growing data and demands, organizations often end up investing in new equipment and space rather than maximizing existing assets.

With DCIM, IT and facilities teams can quickly visualize the data center on a 3D map to get a true picture of current and future capacity. They can also see how increasing the footprint in a specific aisle or rack might impact thermal conditions and power consumption.

Managed services provider RagingWire sees a day when this could be taken a step further to even include people.

Thanks to CA DCIM, the company can already visualize data center capacity, thermal conditions and rack space; it is now integrating its security, electrical and mechanical systems. With GPS awareness, it could eventually add people to its 3D map of the data center, which would help simplify change management and ongoing maintenance.

Manufacturers of data center equipment also stand to benefit by offering more proactive services to their customers. For example, with access to real-time, accurate data they can continually update customers on how their equipment and devices are performing. And with DCIM, customers can turn this data into intelligent analytics to enable more informed decision-making.

Icing on the IoT cake

So, the next time you’re asked, “What is your Internet of Things strategy?” be sure that DCIM is central to your answer. Because DCIM is not just an enabler of the Internet of Things; it’s also an example of it in action.

Like any Internet of Things use case, DCIM captures vast quantities of real-time data from the physical data center – from the airflow in an aisle to the power level of a PDU.

This data is then consolidated and correlated to create operational metrics that can be analyzed to help improve the capacity, efficiency, availability and sustainability of the data center.

With best-of-breed DCIM solutions, these metrics – along with automated workflows for asset management – can be accessed from mobile devices helping to also improve the productivity of the team managing the facility.

This type of visibility not only helps organizations see what they have in the data center but also what they are missing – just like that stick of butter I needed for my last dinner party recipe.

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