Eliminate manual labor associated with inventory managememt.

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Automated Asset Tracking in the Data Center:
How IBM Reduced the Time/Cost of Tracking
Data Center Assets
September 18, 2013

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Slide 2
Manual Asset Tracking Challenges
High cost of manually inventorying asset information
• Time
• Staff
• Painful to reconciliation processes
High cost of inaccurate asset location information
• Inaccurate capacity planning or no capacity planning
• Cost of information latency
• Non-compliance penalties
• Lease mismanagement
• Over provisioning
High cost of security exposures
• Lack of asset location visibility

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Slide 3
Understanding the “Real” Costs of Manual Asset Tracking
Example: 500 racks,30 IT devices per rack (15,000 devices)
• Basic assumptions:
• 4 year asset life span
• 2 inventory collections per year (per IAITAM guidelines)
• Average of 60 seconds per asset to manual collect inventory
information
• 10% of inventoried assets require reconciliation
• 60 minutes per unreconcilied asset for dispositioning
• Asset repository is 90% accurate
• Average time to search and find an asset is 4 hours
• 0.25% assets go missing and can’t be found
• IT employee burden rate of $100 per hour

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Slide 4
Understanding the “Real” Costs of Manual Asset Tracking
Activity Yearly Cost Man Days
Inventory Collection $52K 66
Inventory Reconciliation $300K 375
Finding Misplaced Assets $192K 240
Manual Repository Updates $20K 25
Replacement of Misplaced Assets $150K n/a
Total: $714K 706

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Slide 5
Technologies for Asset Tracking in the Data Center
Accuracy
Level of
Automation
Implementation
Costs
Execution
Costs
Human Read Labels Low None Low Very High
Barcode High None Low Very High
Passive RFID High Low Medium High
Active RFID High High High Low
Note: Execution costs are reoccurring every year.

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Slide 6
Fully Automated Asset Tracking Benefits
Eliminate manual labor associated with inventory collection and
inventory reconciliation
• Frees up staff to perform other important tasks and functions
• Much easier to reconcile missing assets hours or days after they are missing than
months later (the single most costly activity in physical asset tracking)
Accurate up-to-date asset inventory is always available
• Faster find, fix, and repair actions
• Enables real-time capacity planning decisions
• Enables DCIM applications to correlate physical asset location with asset usage
and infrastructure usage driving data center optimization
• Improved management of extended warranties and leases based on actual asset
usage and location
• Reduce security exposures via increased real-time asset visibility

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Speaker: Brent Kiger
Global RFID Technical Solutions Architect, IBM
Integrated Supply Chain Asset Management Services
IBM: Smarter IT Asset Management

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Slide 8
We used it first…
• Issues we faced:
§ Expensive physical inventory costs
§ Long, costly reconciliations
§ Numerous audit inventories
§ Assets moving without proper
change management
§ Increasing environmental
monitoring costs
• IBM’s Pilot Data Center
§ 48,000 sq feet
§ 5000 total devices
w Included all asset types –
mainframes, blade servers, disk,
and tape storage
§ Monitored Storage/Staging room
§ Monitored Equipment entrance
§ Monitored ManTrap entrance
Smarter IT Asset Management Pilot

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Slide 9
Smarter IT Asset Management Components
• Smarter Asset Tags are installed on all assets to be tracked
• Smarter Environmental Tags are installed at all points where
environmental data needs to be reported
• Readers are installed in the data center ceiling and in any other
location (ramps, docks, storage rooms, etc.) where assets may travel
• Rack Locators can be installed in individual racks to provide rack level
granularity (optional component currently being tested)
• Multi-tiered Software Application reads tag signals, relates to
established asset data, generates alerts, and provides for seamless
integration to back end asset management and environmental
systems.
• IBM Software Applications, including Tivoli’s Maximo, Monitoring, and
DCIM products, integrate the real time tag information with the key
attributes tracked on assets and environmentals.

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Slide 10
Smarter IT Asset Management Architecture
Readers
Rack Locators
Asset Manager
Asset/Sensor Tags
Inputs of new assets
Alerts
Zone Manager
Maximo
ITM
DCIM

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Slide 11
Lessons Learned
• Improved inventory accuracy from 71.8% to 99.7%
• Identified 13.8% of asset movements have no change
ticket
• Reduced reconciliation time of “lost” assets by 80%
• Reduced locating time of assets for audits, maintenance,
etc. by 94%
• Eliminated virtually all the cost of the manual inventory
process
• Temperature adjustments saved approximately $10k
• ROI currently between 9-13 months
§ Based solely on asset management costs
§ Does not include data loss exposure or environmental monitoring

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Slide 12
IBM’s Next Steps
• 2011 – 5 sites in US and Europe
§ 40,000 assets
§ 200 temperature and humidity and 2 differential air pressure
sensors
• 2012 – 10 sites in US, Europe, and Latin America
§ Additional 30,000 assets
• 2013 – 10-12 addition deployments in US, Europe, Latin
America, and Asia Pacific
§ Determining funding requirements now
• As a result, IBM is deploying Smarter IT Asset
Management across all internal data centers worldwide
over the next 2 years

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Slide 13
The Data Analytics possibilities are endless
• Asset Inventory Activity
§ Asset receipt tracking from the loading
dock
§ Established assets that are no longer
reporting
§ New tags signaling that are not currently
in the asset repository and on the floor
§ Unauthorized asset movement
§ Site to Site Receiving Alerts
§ Disposal Site Receiving Alerts
§ Rack Level monitoring
• Special Area Reporting
§ Storage rooms
§ Man Traps
§ Test/development labs
§ Surveillance system interface – data and
time interface
• Environmental Monitoring
§ Temperature and Humidity
§ Differential Air Pressure
§ Fluid detection
§ PDU Power Usage
• Infrastructure Diagnostics
§ Reader Alerts - List of any readers that
are not currently active
§ Reader Overload – Jamming or
dysfunctional condition
§ Low Battery Alerts

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Slide 14
Thermal Map of IBM’s Pilot Data Center
• Utilizes 30 temperature and
humidity tags and the existing
readers and software.
• Built in integration between
with IBM’s ITM for Energy
Management and Maximo for
Energy Optimization products.
• Annualized, $10K in savings
from temperature adjustments.
• More savings potential once
Siemens BMS integration is
complete.

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Slide 15
Initial Impact on Local Data Center Operations
• No traditional physical inventory at Smarter IT Asset
Management enabled sites
• Reconciliation activity is handled on an immediate basis
§ System detects asset event activity and generates appropriate alert
§ Personnel receives alert and takes immediate action
§ Event/Alert activity is tracked and reported at regular intervals
• Random Spot Check sampling is performed to insure
system integrity
• Hot/cold spots are easily identified and corrected through
building management systems

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Slide 16
Q&A
Questions?

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Slide 17
Contact Information
• Chris Gaskins, RF Code
cgaskins@rfcode.com
• Brent Kiger, IBM
bkiger@us.ibm.com
Thank you for joining us!