DCIM gaining momentum with growth of data centers

 Shekhar Dasgupta
Founder – Greenfield Software

India may still be far from becoming a major data center hub globally but when it comes to adoption of latest technologies, the country has always remained as the front runner. Shekhar Dasgupta, Founder – Greenfield Software talks to VARINDIA more about the software and how its awareness among customers has slowly taken off -

DCIM, as Shekhar Dasgupta, Founder – Greenfield Software puts it is the ERP for the data center that helps to allocate and optimize resources like power, space, cooling, networks and IT resources. But most importantly, it helps preventing wastages.
“A key objective of a data center is to have it constantly uptime (99%), which means you need to have huge amounts of redundancy. When it comes to datacenters, redundancy denotes how much extra or spare power the data center can offer to its customers as a back up during a power outage. You will find the term n+1, where n stands for need. So likewise, on the basis of your requirement, you will be needing n+1, n+2, 2n, 2n+1 and so on. And this is how tier 1 & 2 data centers are defined, of how many additional redundancies it requires,” explains Shekhar Dasgupta, Founder – Greenfield Software.
Redundancy helps when there is a failure. But if there is no failure, then these assets will remain unutilized and will continue consuming unnecessary power and space. The more space these racks occupy, the more cooling it requires. “When the dot-com bubble took place in the late 90’s, people started building large server firms. There was this large power crisis in California and the region that has been power abundant has suddenly started seeing frequent power cuts. A whole host of technologies started coming in to tackle this issue, and one technology that has risen out of these many technologies is DCIM,” muses Shekhar. 

Elements of DCIM…
The most important role of DCIM is that of Energy efficiency. It tries to identify the hot and cold spots in a data center and makes recommendations of where additional cooling is required. “For instance, when everyone is filing income tax returns in the month-end of July, there will be some servers which will be heavily utilized for filing the returns whereas there may be some email servers which will only be partially used. The email servers will not need too much of cooling as the heavily utilized ones. So this software will tell you which area needs  maximum cooling,” explains Shekhar.
Another area in DCIM is Capacity Planning, which is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands. The average annual utilization of a server CPU is as low as 7 %, which is a global standard. By planning its capacity,  these machines can be virtualized and the utilization can go up by 30-35% .
Asset Management is another important area when one considers DCIM. Most data centers manage their assets by use of spreadsheets. People in a data center may have different goals and they manage different assets and maintain separate spreadsheets. This creates big problems as there is no interdependency between the machines, and this leads to many data centers to fail. Asset Management helps to counter this problem and systematically deploys, operates, maintains, upgrades and disposes assets cost-effectively.

In the end…
Greenfield Software, as one of the leading players in DCIM has got enterprise as its most important customers. It is also able to get to the Government vertical by working with the System integrators. “We try to be different from the rest by doing some bits of customization. If DCIM requires to be integrated with building management tool or any systems management tool or power meters, we offer to do that for our customer,” Shekhar says.  It works with SIs (global SIs) and tech providers to support its customers.
While many customers wanted from a perspective of customer planning, most of them wanted to adopt DCIM as a best practice of reducing wastage since they were coming under cost pressures. Wastage is really high and people are realizing it fast. “Today at least 40% of a customer’s operating cost is power related and nobody would like wastage of so much of computing power,” asserts Shekhar.
2 years back, the awareness for DCIM was relatively low and though it was already been adopted in the US and European markets. But as data centers started proliferating and consolidating, the need for DCIM software is becoming significantly higher, with even mid-sized data centers starting to adopt it. So the more the data centers grow, the more important DCIM becomes.
samrita@varindia.com