operations and out to the public cloud In the corporate

world, shareholders demand to see how their money is

being spent and what e orts to eliminate waste are being
ta en
» Environmental: No organization wants to waste money
on e tra energy costs but playing the carbon neutral
game has been ust that for many years owe er with the
growing interest in the E to regulate the carbon footprint
of data centers and global organi ations appointing E
o cers to appease shareholders the focus on sustainability
e orts is becoming more intense

Existing Infrastructure Risk and

Potential Loss of Availability
The o er oes out it s a fact of life. There are enerators, battery
bac u s, redundant systems, and failo er sites, but sometimes all
that fails, too. The lifeblood of any modern or ani ation is the
a lications that dri e their business. Ho do you a ly a belt
and sus enders a roach to ensurin those a lications stay u
and runnin or reco er as uic ly as ossible in the e ent of an
outa e in your data center

You can t sol e e ery concei able or inconcei able situation,

but a solid ame lan, tools to monitor, and ad anced arnin
technolo y can considerably lo er the ris . Additional challen es
come from maintainin li hts out and remote/ed e sites here
ersonnel may be relati ely uns illed or access is limited.

E eryone ishes for a crystal ball to see into the future. The
ability to determine hen a lanned or un lanned disru tion
ill occur and hat systems and a lication or loads ill be
affected eludes many data center mana ers. It s also frustratin
that millions of sensor and telemetry oints could shed li ht on
the ine itable. Still, the ability to consume and rocess the data
in a meanin ful manner is dauntin for a mere mortal human .

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
» Optimizing your data center workloads

» Ensuring the integrity of your data center

assets

» Leveraging arti cial intelligence and

machine learning

» Getting real with augmented reality

» Integrating critical third-party systems

with DCIM

Chapter 3
Exploring Next-
Generation DCIM

I
n this chapter, I describe several next-generation data center
integration management (DCIM) capabilities and modules that
you should look for in your DCIM solution.

Workload Optimization
As data centers grow in scale and complexity, it’s no longer suf-
cient to only monitor s ace, o er, and coolin . System uti-
lization, or the lack of it, is increasingly being scrutinized as
enterprises routinely discover that upwards of 20 percent of the
servers in their data center are “ghost servers” that idly consume
energy but serve no business function.

Effecti e monitorin enables or ani ations to o timi e or -

load performance within their data center based on a variety of
considerations, including performance, latency, security, cost,
and more. Optimum workload placement can be determined, and
mi ration can be automated across different irtuali ed ser -
ers, physical data centers, public clouds, and edge computing
environments.

CHAPTER 3 Exploring Next-Generation DCIM 19

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 Critical components to help you truly optimize an application’s
full or load include see Fi ure

» Power and cooling management

» Space planning
» Asset life-cycle management
» utomated wor ow management
» Management of remote location resources for colocation
and edge computing

FIGURE -1: Critical components in a workload optimization solution.

Asset Integrity Monitoring

Asset inte rity monitorin offers a streamlined system that cre-
ates a baseline for all the critical assets you need to manage,
enabling you to harden your physical compute environment by
proactively evaluating the resilience of your asset tracking and
management.

Asset inte rity monitorin identi es ersions of soft are and

rm are that are unauthori ed or ha e no n ulnerabilities
so you can head off security issues before they occur. It brin s
awareness of all devices attached to your networks, monitors for
changes and compliance, and provides the ability to report and
respond to unauthorized assets, software, and changes.

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 Ultimately, all the applications and data your organization man-
ages depend on a stable and secure physical infrastructure.
Whether this infrastructure is located in your own data cen-
ters, in a hosted colocation facility, or at the edge, you must be
certain these resources are not intentionally or unintentionally
compromised.

Resources can become compromised when personnel make

unplanned and/or unrecorded changes to assets. They may add or
remove assets, such as servers or server blades, without approval
or without recording the information centrally, which can then
leave your organization open to cyberattacks or to costly out-
ages. Devices can be installed that don’t meet security or safety
standards.

Additionally, new security threats are constantly being identi-

ed and re uire the latest rm are and soft are atches to be
applied to hardware to close these vulnerabilities. Yet many orga-
nizations don’t have a comprehensive list of all hardware and the
ersions of rm are and soft are runnin on assets throu hout
their network, which results in these systems being vulnerable to
cyberattacks.

Asset inte rity monitorin includes the follo in

» Discovery: Asset integrity monitoring starts with a baseline

of assets. This consists of your DCIM inventory database
augmented by a thorough discovery scan across your
network. This compiled asset list becomes the single source
of truth including power compute software and rmware
network connections, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT)
devices.
» Change management: Change management practices and
protocols are established based on ational Institute of
tandards and Technologies ( I T) best practices an ITI
(formerly the Information Technology Infrastructure ibrary)
framework, and integration with an IT service management
(IT M) con guration management database (CMD ) and
other systems. To reduce human error and risk from
repetitive tasks, adopt a DCIM solution that automates
standardi ed infrastructure change management wor ows
astly de ne reporting and enforcement procedures across
IT operations security nance and human resources
systems.

CHAPTER 3 Exploring Next-Generation DCIM 21

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 » Monitoring: Inspect what you expect, rinse, and repeat.
Proactively scan to determine changes made to the physical
compute infrastructure. Compare against the single source
of truth and change management protocols. Inspect, record,
and report any changes that are outside the baseline or set
of expected changes. Update the DCIM source of truth asset
database.
» Alerting and reporting: Share the knowledge. Correlating
changes to the physical compute environment and reporting
them to concerned groups pro ides many bene ts IT
operations can see repeat o enders ma ing unauthori ed
or undocumented changes. This can help you avoid unex-
pected changes to power or the introduction of potentially
harmful equipment and software, leading to disruptions or
catastrophic events. Security teams can monitor for vulner-
abilities introduced by unauthorized devices, applications,
and network connections. Finance can accurately audit and
validate inventory to ensure support, maintenance, and
license expenses are accurately accounted for.

Machine Learning
The scale, com le ity, and re uired o timi ation of modern data
centers re uires mana ement by arti cial intelli ence AI
because data centers increasingly cannot be planned and man-
a ed ith traditional rules and heuristics. Se eral use cases lend
themsel es es ecially ell to AI and machine learnin

» Predictive power and thermal: Optimize thermal perfor-

mance by predicting application and underlying power
behavior.
» Workload/hybrid cloud optimization: Use critical infra-
structure data as a new source of insight to optimally place
workloads within and across data centers for enhanced
availability and performance.
» Placement optimization: Optimally place equipment
based on thermal power communications and application
vectors.

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