A few weeks into the new year, I start planning our annual summer get-together in Minnesota with friends and family. It’s always a great vacation; it’s also always a logistical challenge requiring a large dose of persistence and patience.

As an engineer, I fantasize about a logical solution that could provide a real-time, centralized view of everyone’s schedules. My dream solution would analyze the best week for our trip, send automated calendar invites and ensure no one forgets their swimsuit for that obligatory dip in the lake.

For data center managers, centralized and granular visibility with analytics are also critically important across IT and facilities. Just knowing a web server is down is no longer enough. To accelerate resolution, organizations also need to know if the problem or incident is due to patchy network connectivity, a cabinet over-heating or insufficient CPU.

Determining the root cause of such an outage invariably involves lots of different dashboards and different teams – and lots of time, which is too often in the middle of the night. The longer the clock ticks, the bigger the impact on productivity and job satisfaction…

…And, in the worse-case scenarios, the bigger the impact on revenue and reputation.

As Nets IT operations team manager Frank Bredo Remen reveals: “If a critical incident occurred everything would come to a halt. Transactions would stop processing and we’d begin losing money immediately.”

For Nets, an electronic payment services provider, taking a unified approach to monitoring its systems and applications was key to meeting customer demands for continuous uptime. By deploying a unified infrastructure management approach, Nets has been able to improve availability, reduce costs and eliminate manual tasks.

Shutting down the silos

Thanks to DCIM integrations, this unified approach doesn’t have to stop at the IT layer; it can also encompass other key operational elements of the data center, such as power capacity and space availability in racks, all through a single dashboard.

Enabling this single view is critical. The data center has evolved rapidly over the last 20 years. With each new technology stack, a new operational silo has been born with its own team, processes and management tools. This has resulted in a patchwork approach to data center management, which is increasingly ineffective in today’s interconnected, dynamic IT landscape.

With centralized visibility enabled by DCIM, organizations can not only see if an existing server has sufficient CPU capacity to host additional workloads, but also if a rack has available network ports and an aisle has enough cooling to support the deployment of a new set of servers.

The ability to monitor and manage data center capacity in all its forms is becoming increasingly important to support business growth. In its “2015 Planning Guide for Data Center Modernization and Consolidation”, Gartner stated: “In 2015, IT organizations will reach an inflection point, at which business velocity outpaces IT’s ability to meet its demands.”

Enhanced analytics, including ‘time to threshold’ predictions can help close this gap between demand and supply by predicting when an infrastructure element might experience performance issues. These analytics can focus on a range of IT and facilities factors within the data center, including power or CPU resources.

By making these types of analytics available to all stakeholders, organizations can also close the people gap that often exists between the IT operations and the facility operations teams of a data center.

As a result, all groups can collaborate on delivering the best outcomes to the business by maximizing the utilization and efficiency of the data center and minimizing the risk of downtime.

If only I could apply the same analytical power to the summer vacation planning challenge… …Surely there’s an app out there somewhere!

The post A new point of view in the data center appeared first on Highlight.