You might have seen the Magic Quadrant report or DCIM Landscape report with the “leading” DCIM vendors? One of those mentioned companies, CA Technology recently decided to stop all DCIM activities because it was just not profitable for them.
An interesting explanation about why they stopped and why they were called “leading” is found on: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/11/25/why-ca-stopped-selling-its-dcimsoftware-suite/
DCIM is too often sold as the Magic trick to solve all uncontrolled issues, bringing full asset
management and optimize daily operations. In our opinion this approach will only lead to
disappointments. Yes, DCIM can bring a lot of improvements, solve many issues and manage your assets but your first DCIM goal(s) should be detailed and clear from the beginning of the project. To give an impression: You can use your DCIM to adjust (minimize and delay) your capital investments. In the example below we explain how?
If a new customer comes in he orders a number of racks (for instance 20) with an expected power consumption per rack (for instance 2500 W per rack, so 50 kW in total). In practice you will see that the peak consumption of this customer starts at 5 kW and on average he will slowly grow to 35 Kw in total. The chance that he will ever use the 20×2500 W is very small.
In our DCIM system we correlate contract data with nominal and actual consumption data to calculate and visualize the used and unused capacity. This last item is very interesting for optimization purposes!We know the peak power consumption, the power consumption growth speed, the available and actually needed capacity. Based on this information you can install real needed equipment (UPS, Cooling, No-break, etc.) instead of order intake based equipment. Now you can continuously optimize your equipment to your actual and short term predicted needs. The major advantage is that you postpone your capital investment and minimize the risk of an outage. In practice we discovered that in general only 25% of the designed and often installed equipment was needed at the start and 75% in a full operational datacenter. In this situation DCIM leads to 75% CAPEX saving in the beginning and 25%
at the end. The OPEX saving is now even bigger. And this is just one of the many ways to turn your ‘nice-to-have‘ DCIM tool to solution you cannot do without.
You want know about other DCIM possibilities? Send an email to mailto:info@perf-it.com
