This document discusses the challenges of managing data center assets and how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software can help address them. It describes how DCIM software provides visibility into diverse IT assets and their complex interdependencies. It also explains that DCIM software can help with budgeting, capacity planning, impact analysis, and other key data center management tasks. The document advocates for a comprehensive single-vendor DCIM solution rather than multiple specialized point tools.

1. Critical Considerations for Managing
Data Center Assets
How DCIM Software Can Impact your Data Center Operations
Device42, Inc. | 760 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06510 | (866) 343-7242 | www.device42.com
DEVICE42 WHITE PAPER | April 2015
Making IT Matter
Device42, Inc. | 760 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06510 | (866) 343-7242 | www.device42.com

2. Device42, Inc. | Copyright 2015 2
INTRODUCTION
Managing physical, logical, and cloud infrastructures in a data
center involves an expansive range of capabilities. While there
may be numerous ways to define these capabilities, here is
one perspective that outlines the key areas for data center
infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions:
▪ IP Address management
▪ Inventory/asset management
▪ Power and environmental monitoring and control
▪ Impact management
▪ Password management
▪ Cloud management
▪ Cable management
Regardless of how these areas are classified, effectively managing a data center comes
down to having a centralized data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool that
makes IT assets visible, understandable, and controllable.
This white paper will explore both the challenges and critical considerations of effectively
managing data center assets along with solution capabilities that make effectively man-
aging IT assets possible.
IDENTIFYING THE COMMON CHALLENGES
One of the best ways to illustrate the many challenges and areas of expertise involved in
managing en enterprise data center, is to address common scenarios experienced by
CFO’s, CIO’s, CTO’s, and IT managers:
It’s budget time one again and you have numerous requests for new servers. The
projects all sound worthwhile. But you barely received CAPEX approval for last year’s
servers and face a similar task again. To prepare for budget discussions you need a
host of questions answered:
▪ How are the servers purchased last year being used?
▪ What applications are running on which servers?
▪ Which business units, cost centers, projects, or departments are assets
assigned to?
▪ How much is each business unit, cost center, project, and/or department costing
in IT assets?
This white paper
will explore both
the challenges
and critical
considerations
of effectively
managing data
center assets ...

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▪ Your monitoring systems report that one or more
servers are either under stress or are down. While the
team begins addressing the problem, affected cus-
tomers and internal users need to ne notified. But the
team doesn’t know the applications running on the
affected servers, much less who the users are.
▪ Your servers are in a colocation facility and you
periodically exceed your planned energy expense.
You’d like to consider solutions to remain within your power allotment without
affecting critical application services. The problem is you don’t have any way
to look at historical energy usage and you don’t know which servers are running
critical vs. low priority applications.
▪ It’s audit time again and the auditors want to know what users have write access to
each server, database, and application. They also want you to prove that pass-
words have been changed every 3 months over the past year. How do you do that?
▪ You need to create disaster recovery and business continuity plans but no one
knows which applications and users will be affected by losing which servers,
switches, and other devices.
Unfortunately, these situations, and numerous other ones like them, are common experi-
ences for data center managers and engineers. Fortunately, they issues do not have to be
problematic or challenging.
Addressing these issues starts with understanding and managing the interdependencies
between IT assets.
THE INTERDEPENDENCIES OF IT ASSETS
The assets within your data center are numerous and diverse spanning multiple
categories across physical, logical and cloud environments:
▪ Switches, routers
▪ Buildings, rooms, racks
▪ PDU’s
▪ Spare parts (CPU’s, disk drives, RAM, etc.)
▪ Software applications, operating systems, database platforms
▪ Storage networks
▪ Physical, virtual, and cloud servers
▪ IP space, subnets, VLANs, VRF groups, MAC addresses
▪ DNS
... assets within
your data center
are numerous
and diverse
spanningmultiple
categories ...

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▪ Patch panels
▪ Users and user groups
▪ Accounts and passwords
▪ Software services running on devices
▪ Applications running on devices
▪ Miscellaneous assets including: HVAC, breaker
panels, DMARC’s, fabric extenders, fax machines,
filler panels, monitors, projectors, scanners,
shredders, sensors, … and more
And all of these assets have many interdependencies with
one another. For example,
▪ IP addresses are assigned to devices
▪ Applications can be on physical, virtual, or cloud devices
▪ Customers and internal users are dependent on applications
▪ Passwords are assigned to devices and applications
▪ Users and groups need varied access privileges
▪ Assets are interconnected by switches and patch panels
▪ Assets are connected to and powered by PDU’s
The point is, assets and their interdependencies are extremely complex
and having an accurate visibility and an understanding of these assets and
their independencies is critical to effectively managing the data center.
Furthermore, the need to understand these interdependencies is no more
apparent than during scheduled and unscheduled data center outages.
That’s where data center infrastructure management software (DCIM)
serves as a power tool.
EXPLORING THE VIRTUES OF DATA CENTER SOFTWARE
Remembering the scenarios addressed earlier in this document, it is safe to say that a
single, comprehensive DCIM software solution can prevent the common frustrations
experienced by data center managers and engineers.
More importantly, the right DCIM software can provide accurate, real-time information
that enables proactive data center management, improved responses to unplanned
service outages, better user support, and increased responsiveness to organizational
needs – to name a few.

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DCIM SOLUTION COMPONENTS
While the capabilities of DCIM software vary by solution provider, and some vendors may
provide limited but “deep” solution capabilities in a limited few number of data center
disciplines, the scope of DCIM solution can span multiple disciplines and operational areas
as depicted the “DCIM Solution Components” diagram shown below.
Put simply, data center infrastructure management software enables companies to track
and manage IT assets, their interactions, and their dependencies. From a finance perspective,
DCIM software also enables companies to track the costs of all these assets by department,
cost center, project, customer, and user.
DCIM software is also a vital tool in effective capacity planning (e.g. adding locations,
rooms, colocation cages and/or racks). For example, with accurate information about IT
assets, including their capacities and their utilization, companies can avoid unnecessary
cost by using existing racks or other hardware rather than buying new. This capacity per-
spective is not only invaluable in the routine management of data center hardware costs,
but also in the management of unplanned capacity changes where urgent time constraints
are components in a timely resolution.
Using DCIM software, companies can also construct realistic budgets
based on actual expenditures by department or cost center. In addition, DCIM software can
accurately provide information that enables accurate IT cost allocations by business unit.
With the shift toward virtualization and cloud services, DCIM software can also help organi-
zations analyze virtualization usage and provide data that can be vital in architecting or
deconstructing data centers with physical, virtual and cloud components.
DCIM software can also be a vital tool to accurately understand the impact of both panned
and unplanned system outages and performance issues. With the right DCIM software, the
relationships between devices, software, and users is clearly defined, visualized, and
instantly available.
... data center
infrastructure
management
software enables
companies to
track and
manage IT
assets, their
interactions,
and their
dependencies.
SOLUTION
COMPONENTS

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From within a single DCIM console data center staff can monitor, report, analyze and
even control power utilization at intelligent PDUs and outlets that service, racks, rooms,
servers, and even buildings. DCIM software capabilities should also include the ability to
monitor environmental sensors such as temperature, humidity, presence of water, access
and egress sensors, and more.
While these capabilities represent only a portion of the capabilities of a comprehensive
DCIM solution, they provide insight into how DCIM software can address the common
issues involved in managing a data center.
DCIM SOFTWARE WRAP-UP
By now, it is clear that DCIM software has the potential to dramatically impact data center
manageability as well as service and support of your IT infrastructure. Be aware that the
DCIM marketplace has been established for more than a decade and that there are a
range of solutions that support specific aspects of managing
a data center. The result is that managing a data center with
comprehensive functionality could result in using multiple
relatively high-priced, narrowly focused solutions – each with
a unique UI and management console.
Incontrasttoaspecialized,multi-solutionapproachtoDCIM,busi-
nessescanacquireasingleDCIMsolutionthatprovidesabroad
rangeoffunctionalityfromwithinasingleapplicationthatcostsa
fractionofanyoneofthemanysolution-specificDCIMtools.
If your organization is considering the introduction of a
DCIM tool into your data center, or considering deploying an
additional DCIM tool to address specific data center needs, be sure to define and prioritize
your requirements before engaging with DCIM solution providers. This will enable your
enterprise to match the best solution to meet your needs, instead of aligning your business
to meet the capabilities of DCIM solutions available on the market today.
Lastly, ensure your evaluation of the solutions includes a complete understanding of the
implementation requirements, the challenges or ease of integrating the solution to your
data center, the accuracy of the provider’s capability claims, the support requirements for
operating the solution within the enterprise, and, most important of all, the references and
experiences of clients that have deployed the solution in organizations and environments
similar to yours.
Data Center Infrastructure management solutions can have a profound and positive
impact of your data center operations. The effectiveness of “homegrown” solutions
based on desktop technologies such as Excel and Visio is usually a fraction of the effec-
tiveness of purpose-built data center management solutions. As a result, exploring DCIM
solutions is an exercise that can yield significant benefits and advantages.
Data Center
Infrastructure
management
solutions can
have a profound
and positive
impact of your
data center
operations.

7. Device42, Inc. | Copyright 2015 7
Device42, Inc. | 760 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06510 | (866) 343-7242 | www.device42.com
Device42
enables quick,
easy, and
effective IT
infrastructure
management.
ABOUT DEVICE42
Device 42 Inc., a leader in Data Center Infrastructure Manage-
ment (DCIM), delivers comprehensive, low cost solutions that
enable organizations around the globe to quickly, easily, and
effectively manage their complex IT infrastructures. Device42
software centralizes data center management making IT
assets visible, understandable, and controllable.
Using Device42, companies can identify, visualize, and manage devices (whether physical,
virtual, or cloud), networks components, software, and passwords using a browser
interface. Device42 helps companies visualize their infrastructure, understand network
interdependencies, improve network security, and mitigate the impacts of planned and
unplanned IT network changes. Device42 is delivered as a virtual appliance, is easily
installed, and provides comprehensive features including auto-discovery via RESTful APIs
for rapid data input and reliable results.
Download a free trial, or schedule a demo of Device42 and see why an ever-increasing
number of companies around the globe are using Device42 to manage their data centers.
Additional information about Device42 can be found at www.device42.com.
Device42, Inc. | 760 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06510 | (866) 343-7242 | www.device42.com