Data Center Power

Data Center Power Monitoring Company Talks DCIM Partnerships

By Carrie Schmelkin TMCnet Web Editor

Data center power and environmental monitoring company Server Technology (News - Alert) has an important question that it wants to answer for its customers: “Why do you need a DCIM solution?”

Recently, Server Technology’s Senior Director of Software and Firmware Development Calvin Nicholson sat down with TMCnet to discuss why Server Technology partners with DCIM providers and what benefit this affords the data center power company’s customers.

“The SPM software application provides a central location to monitor, manage and control Server Technology’s and competitors Cabinet Power Distribution Unit CDUs,” Nicholson told TMCnet. “SPM provides information like reports, trends, and scheduling, we can schedule data base backups when reports will be created and then automatically email them out to people, and we can also schedule other items like data base maintenance or scheduling device shut downs.”

“SPM can also automate CDU firmware upgrades, configuration changes, and CDU discoveries making it the central location for CDU management, capacity planning and all alerts and alarms,” he added. “So rather than having the DCIM solution recreate this functionality SPM provides power and environmental up to the DCIM system providing the user with the single pane of glass view that they desire. While still allowing the user to provide all the support and detailed information provided by the CDU’s when the user queries SPM. The benefit for the customer is that they get critical information about why the company partners with DCIM vendors.”

Server Technology has been partnering with DCIM providers as these systems have become more popular as a way to help offer Server Technology customers the most complete and robust monitoring solutions. A DCIM solution offers many benefits including the fact that it provides the user with the “single pane of glass” view they want within their data center; that it can communicate with Server Technology’s CDUs and its competitors CDUs3, and that users can input power and environmental information from the CDUs but not reinvent the wheel for discovery, inventory, configuration, upgrades and support of the STI CDUs which can all be done within SPM.

DCIM solutions are “hot right now,” according to Nicholson, because they are “definitely filling a gap of monitoring and management and to some extent control within the data center across all the different devices and systems that are out there.”

“In the data center world, you have the facility side and the IT side and the DCIM solutions and our products bridge the gap between IT and facilities,” he said. “DCIM can monitor information on the IT side and it can handle the heavy metal equipment like CRAC units, and air handling and all that kind of stuff from the facility side as well.”

Moreover, as data centers become increasingly complex and the need to monitor things like data center power and environmental increases exponentially, the need to partner with DCIM providers burgeons.

“The data centers are getting more complex; they want to be more efficient, they need more information to be more efficient and they want to take the information that we provide and actually use it to make decisions,” Nicholson said. “They are using the information to control the environment – not just to look at it and not just monitor. It’s getting more interactive within the data center as they try to save power and as we know power costs are going up and power availability is going down.”