Circus tricks and software: 5 reasons to integrate your data center’s systems

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Can you juggle? These days, data center managers seem as adept at circus tricks as they are at understanding the technologies inside their four walls. But we’re dealing with Big Data, not the Big Top, and the cost of dropping the ball is high.

Chances are you’re overseeing a whole host of critical tools, from Building Management Systems (BMS), Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) applications, Workflow Management Systems, Content Management Systems and more. It’s a feat of mental dexterity, but it doesn’t need to be.

While each of those systems is unique, separate and vitally important to the health and efficiency of your data center, it’s possible to combine them into an integrated solution that makes everything much more manageable.

You see, when stakeholders have to monitor and gather data from multiple sources to check on overall health and efficiency of data center, things get messy. An alternative, and more integrated approach, takes the data relating to temperature, power, cooling and other monitored data center systems and weaves it into a central control point.

This model unifies isolated data scattered across multiple storages and results in near real-time analysis, more competent decision-making and avoids the duplication of effort. In some cases it can also minimize cost and increase agility.

Consolidating data in one place not only overcomes drawbacks, but also adds a lot of value by simplifying management of complex data. Instead of juggling all those systems, it’s possible to build a single source of unique truth, upon which decisions can be made with confidence.

And if that doesn’t convince you, here are a five of other incentives to stop juggling and start integrating your data center software:

• Access to vast repositories of data and information: Power measurements, inventory, environmental measurements such as temperature/humidity/cooling etc. are all made available in one integrated data source. Business logic can be applied in one place to create actionable items.
• Easier, quicker, and more efficient planning and expansion of a data center: Data from assorted systems are available at your disposal to support decision-making and to simulate failure scenarios, as well as assessing the impact of changes and expansions. A coherent single inventory ensures all of the data center assets are visible in one system, making planning, modeling, and efficiency management much easier and simpler. Optimization and normalization of data gives you minimized redundancy and duplication, and data is put in a similar state for format and scale perspective. Data standardization means streamlined operations and management of the data center.
• Granular visibility into data center resources: Single, near real-time data source and consistent visualization for better reporting, dashboard, and billing capabilities is all at hand, once you begin to integrate. There is no longer any need to run reports on, or create and monitor, separate system dashboards. Data from various systems can be used in a holistic manner to generate better reports, which can be compared for analysis and validation against any anomalies.
• Single pane of glass monitoring: Alarms, notifications, trends, and other key metrics from multiple components can be consolidated in one centralized screen, eliminating the need to monitor individual systems and making more efficient use of a data center manager’s time.
• Exploration and analysis of information: Once integrated, data from several systems is available to run complex analytics and draw conclusions. Having everything in one place may lead to some surprising discoveries, as well as allowing you to identify weak links and risk items. Analytics could help you to pinpoint irregular systems, identify and prioritize cost-saving opportunities, perform predictive and preventive maintenance and improve energy efficiency.

We think it’s time you stopped juggling your data center’s software, and started integrating it. Let us know your thoughts, opinions and experiences in the comment section below.