I grew up in the data center. For 25 years, I have seen all of the technologies of the data center mature and become incredibly powerful. We are solving problems today in the data center that could NEVER have even been imagined back then. Frankly it is wildly impressive to see what is possible today.   Technology has been developed at break-neck speeds: Computing density, network and storage fabric intelligence, clustering and deep security have all become not only possible, but almost commonplace today. So what is the next frontier?

The paperwork! Well not really the paperwork per se, but all of the business attributes of technology dealing with predicability and accountability. Remember, those 25 years were an era dedicated to making diverse technologies work together– at any cost. Hardware & Software simply did not play well across vendors and applications. IT’s role was to force things to work together. Who remembers the battles between Ethernet and Token Ring, or RISC vs. CISC? And the list goes on…

One of the last opportunites to competitively differentiate within IT, optimize cost structures and make data centers work more smoothly deals with the area of IT that has been the LEAST POPULAR over those same years… the lifecycle management of assets in a formalized way, where existing assets can be managed over their entire life span, overall capacity planning can be done, and the business can be managed like any other resource, rather than looking at IT as a “black box”. Gartner refers to this as “DCIM” or Data Center Infrastructure Management. It’s the management of the PHYSICAL aspects of a data center and now includes POWER and COOLING!

So, in the past we all drew logical clouds. SQL and LAN clouds, WAN clouds, Server farm clouds, everything was a cloud and logically it was easy to manage applications that way. Not much attention was paid to what was required to house and power and maintain those physical assets since that was considered a facilities “given”. In fact Facilities and IT didn’t even report into the same groups for years. IT would dream things up, and Facilites would ‘get the workorder’ and a due date. It really was like throwing something over the wall.

With power costs now skyrocketting, we all need to ask ourselves if we are managing our data centers in the same manner as we did 5 years ago? If the actual answer is YES, then perhaps it is worth a moment to take a look at the area of DCIM solutions. Solutions that can balance power and cooling, handle application and asset lifecycle costing analysis, identify bottlenecks and redundancy affecting SLAs, and simply provide visibility into this complex data center ‘system’ with a level of granularity never before possible.

Consider the documentation and visibility you currently have to your IT structure. If it is comprised of a slew of documents, CAD drawings, notebooks, hand-drawn diagrams, cocktail napkins and Post-It notes, then perhaps TODAY is a good time to look for a sane physical asset management solution….