DCIM isn’t just about managing current data center capacity; it’s about planning for the future and learning from the past.

The ability to look back at constraints and trends enables IT and facilities managers to get to the root of their problems and identify where they need to close the gap between business demand and data center capacity.

One of the biggest gaps facing organizations today involves space. More than half of organizations cite space as one of their biggest challenges in the data center. Although many businesses are genuinely running out of physical space as the rack footprint grows; system resources, however, are rarely being exploited to their full potential.

It’s estimated some servers are running at less than 10 percent of their potential capacity. This capacity gap often goes undetected due to insufficient visibility of how infrastructure assets are being used – or not – resulting in over-provisioning.

Better visibility, better business decisions

To achieve and maintain operational excellence, organizations don’t just need to know the location of their data center assets, they need to know if they are over-heating, under–performing or sitting idle.

With better visibility of assets and how they relate to data center operations and business outcomes, IT and facilities departments will be able to make better business decisions.

As a result, organizations will be able to optimize efficiency, capacity, and availability, and see in real-time if capacity gaps are growing and prioritize optimization efforts or investment in new resources.

Planning ahead

As well as helping to resolve today’s challenges, DCIM can anticipate tomorrow’s problems. Best-of-breed solutions enable IT and facilities managers to answer those all-important ‘what-if’ questions. When will I run out of rack space? Do I have enough cooling to support more virtual machines? How can I plan effectively for new business initiatives?

Organizations can also use DCIM visualization tools to plan exactly where to deploy a new server or to migrate a workload to maximize their precious data center resources.

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