I love growing my own vegetables, but as a city gardener, space is limited. Every year I want to squeeze in just one more variety of squash or just one more row of carrots to maximise capacity. Today’s data center managers face exactly the same challenge – except it’s not just physical space that’s in short supply.

From the power supply and the CRAC unit to the server rack and the SAN, data center resources are under greater pressure than ever before.

Accelerating time to market

Effective capacity management doesn’t just prevent unnecessary costs on data center expansions and resources. It also accelerates time-to-market for new services and prevents system outages.

Understanding why data center capacity management is important is the easy bit; understanding how to achieve it is a lot harder.

As a result, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy. But there are common tools that can help you achieve your goals; DCIM is one of those tools.

Growing pains

DCIM provides visibility of data center capacity both at the logical and physical layer, helping facilities and IT managers to maximize resources and minimize costs.

To provide such end-to-end visibility, DCIM solutions need to be highly flexible and scalable. From devices and workloads to management systems and performance metrics, the data center is constantly evolving and diversifying.

In such a dynamic landscape, it can be easy to lose track of assets, which often results in either under- or over-utilization. Help, however, is at hand.

From location and configuration to power consumption and thermal conditions, asset management tools can capture a wealth of data – but volume does not always equal value. Organizations must be able make sense of this data in the wider context of the data center and the business to be able to deliver better outcomes.

Using data to unlock potential

To unlock the full potential of DCIM, reliable asset data is fundamental. Power can’t be properly redistributed if there’s no visibility to what is being consumed by which asset. Airflow can’t be modified if there’s no visibility into how many assets are located in each aisle. And new workloads can’t be provisioned if there’s no visibility into available capacity.

Data center operations can only be optimized if organizations know the ‘what, where and how’ of every device. With real-time sensors, IT and facilities departments can ensure that DCIM solutions are constantly polling the latest information as assets are deployed, moved, retired – or consigned to a storeroom.

Location-based information can be combined with other key attributes captured in DCIM solutions, such as capacity utilization and power consumption, to provide even greater intelligence – and even greater business value.

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