Data Center Service Management (DCSM)

What is Data Center Service Management (DCSM)?

The 451 Research Group describes DCSM as the “systems that provide the capability to manage and report on both facilities and IT equipment and resources from a physical point of view (such as numbers of servers in racks, placing of resources, visualization of datacenter floor, racks, cables, use of energy, etc.), and from a logical or virtual point of view (compute power, memory, processor utilization, storage in bytes, networking).”

The physical point of view being Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), and the logical point of view being IT Service Management (ITSM).

The Building Blocks – DCIM, DCSO, DCSM

Data center service optimization (DCSO) refers to the group of products that address the management of the supply and use of energy, real-time financial costing and long-term planning, and the converged management of IT and facilities.

  • DCSO builds upon the framework of DCIM.
  • DCSM is considered to be a core building-block component of DCSO and enables many of the DCSO functions.

ITSM and DCIM goals

The primary goal of ITSM is to better align IT with the business throughout the product or service delivery lifecycle, while the primary goal of DCIM is optimize the performance of the data center that serves that same business. The differences between the two – physical vs. logical – are outlined below:

ITSM (Logical)DCIM (Physical)
Manages virtual assets in a CMDB, that may include static DCIM informationManages infrastructure assets and capacity in a physical asset database:
  • Locations of racks, servers and blades
  • How they are being used
  • Where they are interconnected
  • How that impacts other resources
Optimizes workflow within and outside of data centerTracks workflow within the data center for physical asset moves, adds and changes
Tracks virtual resource information, including virtual resource use and associated costsTracks and monitors environmental conditions, use of space, cooling, and power; energy efficiency and availability
Provides Service Desk Change Management for all changesProvides Service Desk Change Management for physical changes

Working together, through DCSM, workflows can remain aligned with an organization’s ITSM information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) processes and provide an end-to-end service management view.

The components of DCSO and built on
the foundation of DCIM

The Benefits of DCSM

As efficiencies in the data center industry drive businesses toward a process and service view of IT service management, it is likely a similar evolution will occur in the data­ center. The need to integrate the business and data center views and end-to-end processes between both the IT and facilities infrastructure will be enabled through DCSM. DCSM will provide the benefits of:

Single-view of capacity for compute, storage, networks, power and space

End-to-End provisioning chargeback system

Identify, manage and move loads according to problem or dependencies