Tag Archives | Data Center

Webcast: Achieving ROI with DCIM: Making the Business Case

By on April 30, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management, DCIM

Your CA Infrastructure Management (CA IM) solution is helping you to centrally manage the various layers of the IT stack such as servers, networks, applications, and services.  The physical layer, however, can present huge risks and costs associated with power, cooling and space of the data center.  Learn how you can leverage your current investment in CA IM by extending IT management to your data center infrastructure and as a result increase your agility in rolling out applications & services, lower your operating costs, and reduce your risk of downtime due to issues with power or physical environment.

Join CA Technologies and Infosys for a joint webcast on Wednesday, May 15th at 10AM Pacific/1PM Eastern, where we’ll share how leading companies have achieved early ROI with DCIM through a combination of greater efficiency, improved availability and reduced power consumption. You’ll also get insights and best practices on how to convert data center efficiency metrics into meaningful analytics for operational improvement.

Register here.

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Essential DCIM

Essential Indeed Means Simplify: Insights from the DatacenterDynamics Converged NYC Conference

By on March 14, 2013 in DCIM

I recently had the opportunity to speak with a number of IT and Facilities professionals on DCIM success while attending the Datacenter Dynamics Conference in NYC. While at the event, David Brown, President of Datotel, presented the session titled, “Essential DCIM: 5 Things You Need to Know about DCIM & How Datotel Has Put Them to Use.”  We addressed the heart of what makes DCIM a success, a theme that we recognize can be as varied for our data center peers as data center environments are complex.

During conversations that ensued throughout the day, simplification was indeed a theme for each of the five main points David and I addressed:

  1. Decide Your Use Cases:  Power, Space, Cooling, Assets
    DCIM covers a breadth of use cases, both on the facilities side and on the IT infrastructure side.  While it is common business knowledge to view major projects in bite-size chunks and show success before moving to the next stage, the main point relevant for DCIM is that your underlying DCIM technology solution has strength to cover the different points on your journey.  I spoke with one attendee who discussed alarming for redundant power and back-up generation as the primary need for DCIM, but planned on moving into further asset management capabilities for the equipment.  In another conversation, the number one driver for one organization was the need to understand data center capacity across their portfolio and being able to have the right views into their data centers so that they could plan for delivering major new services.
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Come See Us at Gartner Data Center 2012

By on November 28, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Gartner just wrapped up the London version of its annual Data Center Summit and judging from the tweets coming out of it, there should be plenty to see and do when the Summit makes its stop at The Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas next week (December 4 – 6).

Among the highlights of the Las Vegas show: A chance to hear Pulitzer-prize winning humor columnist Dave Barry and Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot that successfully landed his crippled airplane on the Hudson River. Gartner analysts will be there to discuss future trends in IT, including reducing expenses while driving excellence and the role DevOps will play going forward. The latter should be of interest as there is a lot of hype around DevOps and an equal amount of confusion.

CA Technologies will be at the event to demonstrate our data center, cloud, mainframe and, of course, Service Assurance solutions at our two booths (643 and 649) in the show floor. If you’re going to the Summit and are involved in any part of data center or cloud management, you won’t want to miss my colleague Ryan Shopp’s session on Monday, December 3 at 2:30p in Venetian D.

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CA booth at Cisco Live 2012

Who Owns the Cisco UCS?

By on June 14, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

That’s a common question that attendees at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego are asking this week.  They are referring to the generation of unified network, server, and storage solutions:  Cisco UCS.  The answer is:  it depends on the state of the UCS.

Quite naturally, the question comes from network engineers – the vast majority of Cisco Live attendees. But system and database professionals – a growing minority at Cisco Live – have the same question on their minds. If Level 1 Operations Center staff were here – the folks who escalate issues they can’t solve to engineers – they’d no doubt ask the same question.

Every innovation in IT infrastructure, like Cisco UCS, requires related innovations in software tools to manage it. Otherwise, the business benefits of the infrastructure innovation would be diminished by the increased complexity, time and cost of managing it.

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MPLS Ethernet World Congress 2012 a Success!

By on February 15, 2012 in Service Provider Focus, Uncategorized

The main theme of the MPLS Ethernet World Congress conference (hosted in Paris, France, Feb. 6-10, 2012) was “The Cloud Impact” and resulted in topics being largely cloud/data center and Software Driven/Defined Network (SDN) focused. The conference was well attended this year with more than 1,200 delegates attending, with about 75% coming from various service providers and enterprises, and the remainder from device and software vendors. The demographics of attendees were widely dispersed again as is always the case: with large numbers of participants from Europe, America and Asia with even some from Africa and South America (Brazil in particular).

On the first day of the conference, tutorials were presented that focused on these topics, with at least 50% focusing on SDN. Day 1 of the conference saw keynotes from Yakov Rekhter from Juniper Networks and one from Sunil Khandekar from Alcatel-Lucent on clouds, data centers, MPLS and SDN. It is clear that the strategic focus of both of these companies lies in these areas. A number of presentations including my own were focused on SDN and how it will impact data centers, MPLS, Ethernet and cloud technologies. My presentation focused on what I see as an inflection point in the networking and software industries where the areas of networks and applications are more closely aligned via SDN. There seems to be not only significant interest in the industry around SDN, but a number of companies actually building it too. The remainder of the day was punctuated by a number of good presentations, with one in particular from François Lecerf, CTO at Ipanema Technologies.

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Cisco UCS

Is Your Data Center Sustainable?

By on February 15, 2011 in Service Assurance

Data centers are the ultimate power consumers, constantly growing in necessity and consumption. Allowed to run free, they are not sustainable by any measure – power, size and space, or manageability. Technology created them, but now technology is taming them with next-generation data center technology. Virtualization, in combination with cloud computing, is reducing the amount of server hardware required. Simply put, less hardware uses less power and makes for greener data centers that cost less to run. Through not-so-simple technology, the industry is getting there.

Larger organizations typically have larger data centers, often making them the first to move to new technology. But out-of-control sprawl is hitting many organizations hard. Have you been pushing the edge on your data center space and considering a move to a larger space? Or are you maxing out in every direction and entirely rethinking your data center plans? Have you thought of deploying next-generation data center technology to help you gain control? Alternatives to “more of the same” are here and being deployed now.

The discussion of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) that follows is not to imply it is the only alternative, nor is CA Technologies the only partner that integrates with Cisco UCS, but it provides an example of the choices you have. So, if you are looking to revamp your data center solution so it can scale more sustainably, consider these and other alternatives.

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Figure 1: PDU breaker-level energy data view

Making energy resource monitoring a part of your datacenter management strategy

By on December 29, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Datacenter management is a complicated IT discipline that continues to grow more complex as IT departments embrace virtualization and consider cloud computing for future high-tech projects. And now managing technology isn’t the only task IT executives must address in their datacenters; energy and resource monitoring is also required to achieve a full datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) strategy, according to research firm IDC.

IDC evaluated 15 vendors in a November 2010 report entitled “Datacenter Infrastructure Management: A Competitive Landscape of Energy Efficient Management in the Datacenter” and found that most have strengths in different areas, all of which are required for a complete, holistic approach to DCIM.

“Almost all the vendors IDC spoke with monitor more than their own hardware or environments, but simultaneously no single vendor can detect, monitor and control 100% of existing datacenter environments,” the report reads.

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What’s your datacenter infrastructure management plan?

By on December 28, 2010 in Service Assurance

Managing complex, heterogeneous datacenters that feature technologies such as virtualization isn’t going to be easy for any IT department, but a recent research paper from IDC suggests that the vendor community is working to provide the tools and technologies needed to enable energy-efficient, automated and cost-effective environments.

The IDC paper “Datacenter Infrastructure Management: A Competitive Landscape of Energy Efficiency Management in the Datacenter” by IDC research analyst Katherine Broderick examines the challenges today in managing datacenters as well as the proposed solutions offered by vendors. The technology, dubbed datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM), includes disciplines typically handled by IT but also incorporates facilities management, something not traditionally coupled with the IT side of the house.

“Datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) technology enables IT decision makers to continually ensure an optimal (and in some cases, not failing) datacenter environment to keep IT working properly today,” the report reads. “DCIM is truly one of the only places where facilities and IT meet to think about the business’ backbone in a tactical and strategic manner.”

IDC recognized several trends emerging upon examining the DCIM market. To start, the research firm says that although it is a challenge to get a holistic view across an entire datacenter, it is possible. Many vendors attempt to pull this data together into one cohesive view, according to IDC, yet few offer a 100% complete few. A DCIM strategy must incorporate automation technology, which many IT systems management vendors are working to provide to customers now.

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Interop

Interop New York explores advances in IT management, dynamic infrastructure

By on October 25, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Enterprise IT managers understand the need to monitor and control their environments, and they realize the requirements are changing as companies embrace virtualization and consider cloud infrastructure. Panel discussions at Interop New York 2010 last week addressed this need to evolve management practices and offered attendees advice on how to get started.

InteropThe conference, geared toward educating network and IT managers about existing and emerging technologies, offered a variety of tracks and topics on virtualization, cloud, IT management and more. But two sessions in particular homed in on “Advances in Network Management” and “Dynamic Infrastructure management”, according to Patrick Ancipink, vice president of product marketing for Service Assurance at CA Technologies.

Moderated by Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton Metzler & Associates, the panel “Advances in Network Management” featured panelists from NetScout Systems, Extrahop Networks, Visual Network Systems (acquired by Fluke Networks) and CA Technologies. The session promised to share with attendees the advances made by vendors in response to the changing needs of management tools. (Learn more about CA Technologies infrastructure management products here.) According to Ancipink, the panelists did agree on one key point, but opinions varied on the best way to achieve goals.

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Gartner names top 10 strategic technologies for 2011

By on October 21, 2010 in Service Assurance

It’s no surprise that cloud computing topped the list of Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2011, and the research firms expects that and other technologies such as mobile applications and social communications to transform IT departments in the coming years.

During Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2010 in Orlando this week, analysts shared with some 7,000 attendees the technologies the research firm believes have “potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.” Among the criteria to discern a strategic technology from others are the potential to disrupt IT or the business, the requirement for significant budget investment and a risk of being late to adopt the technologies. And strategic technologies don’t necessarily have to be new; they can be existing technologies that have matured to offer more uses, according to Gartner.

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Jim Metzler looks back at his 2009 predictions

By on October 21, 2009 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

In this video (part one of two), Jim Metzler looks back at some prediction he made at the beginning of the year, and how they’re shaping up to reality in this retrospective interview with Jordan Weiss.

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Standards of Proximity

By on June 15, 2009 in Uncategorized

When Savvis promises “proximity hosting,” they mean it – according to this New York Times Magazine article. In Weehawken, New Jersey, right outside of the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a data center that houses the Philadelphia Stock Exchange’s computers. (The PSE is now part of Nasdaq.) Firms compete to have their computers located close – physically [...]

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