As modern data center environments continue to grow increasingly complex, more data center professionals are turning to Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions to help manage their data centers. The benefits of DCIM can be found in time savings, improved people productivity, and cost savings.

All organizations should find DCIM valuable. If you are one of the remaining organizations that have yet to adopt DCIM software, here are the top 6 reasons your company needs DCIM software today:

1. Easily locate and understand your assets and connections: Do you use spreadsheets, Visio, or homegrown tools to track what assets are in your data center, where they are located, and how they are connected? Do you physically go on-site to determine space availability? Are your records inaccurate and incomplete? If the answer is yes to any of these, you need DCIM software. The asset management capabilities of DCIM provide instantaneous visual and textual information on the equipment in the data center, eliminate the need to send someone physically on-site, and acts as a centralized database to enable accurate record-keeping and processes.
2. Know your key resource capacity and where to deploy new equipment: Do you know how much space, power, cooling, and network capacity is available in your data center or where the best place is to reserve space and deploy new IT equipment for optimal utilization? Do you have difficulty getting the data you need to convince management that you need more capacity? A DCIM solution will provide the data and capabilities you need for a complete, accurate view of capacity and simplify how you find and reserve capacity to optimize utilization. You can leverage capacity reports to clearly demonstrate to your management teams your need to purchase additional capacity.
3. Enhance workflow management: Is your organization constantly experiencing delays in processing work orders? Do you have a way to monitor the progress and productivity of change orders Is there an inability to ensure processes are followed? With DCIM, you can better manage change within your data center by optimizing your current operations, assets, and infrastructure with powerful and intelligent workflow automation. DCIM enables you to generate change requests, automate device moves, and maintain a complete audit trail of requests and work orders for compliance.
4. Ensure uptime and availability: Data centers everywhere are approaching operational capacity limits and power resources are increasingly constrained. Do you know how much power you are using and how much is available? A comprehensive DCIM solution will provide power utilization trends and capacity across your power chain, help you find stranded power to avoid costly build-outs, and improve uptime with constant monitoring with thresholds and alerts before circuits fail.
5. Maintain a safe environment for IT equipment: How do you know if you are overcooling your data center and paying for more cooling resources than you need? Are you certain that you have a safe operating environment for your equipment? With servers generating more heat than ever and rack densities on the rise, hot spots are a natural by-product of the demands of modern computing. As a result, you may not be getting the alerts you need to notify that conditions exceed pre-set limits, or you might not have a tool to see what will happen if you increase the temperature, without creating a hot spot. You need DCIM with a complete intelligent environment management solution to help you identify trouble areas and maintain a safe environment.
6. Increase energy efficiency and save money: Do you have an effective means of measuring PUE? Do you need to create energy cost reports for customers? Can you easily identify active power, energy, cost, and environmental trends? DCIM software can help you understand what is drawing energy in your facility and find ways to save on energy usage. It consolidates information into actionable reports, enabling you to save power and money, and drive green data center and sustainability initiatives.

With DCIM, employees no longer need to be on-site to identify what assets are in the data center and what key resources, such as space, power, and cooling, are available. Data center managers can have access to accurate data in real-time with just a click of a button. Asset details and their physical network and power connections can be easily understood to enable extremely accurate capacity planning down to the port level. Critical path capacity points are automatically identified to reduce the risk of failures. Moves, adds, and changes are easily accomplished.

Want to see how your company can benefit from Sunbird’s industry-leading second-generation DCIM software? Take a test drive today.