The Raritan Blog

Raritan will be unveiling an industry-first DCIM solution at next week's Gartner Data Center Conference

Dorothy Ochs
November 27, 2012

We are inviting you to see our new solution.  Stop by Raritan’s booth #711 to learn how to simplify and reduce the cost of instrumenting your data center for DCIM.  Intelligent PDUs and environmental and electronic asset sensors now can be added to racks without investing the time and cost associated with running wired Ethernet connections.

We will also be showing how our DCIM solutions can help you monitor energy, capacity, assets, and the overall health of your data center.

Visit gartner.com/us/datacenter to register now with priority code DCSP5 and receive a special $300 discount.

We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Common Pain Points in Data Center Infrastructure Management

November 20, 2012

By - Khaled Nassoura, PE, General Manager, DCIM Software of Raritan

As we meet with companies around the world - from small, to midsize, to large enterprises - we’re struck by the similarities of the difficulties they share in managing their data centers.

If we had to pick one, over-arching description of the common problem, it’s this:

Knowing the physical, logical relationships that tie all their data center assets together as well as how these assets are tied to the infrastructure that supports them.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you would like to know the impact an infrastructure element such as a circuit breaker or a network switch port may have, upstream, on the servers that are connected to it. Furthermore, you’d like to know what applications are running on these servers and what departments or business units are being supported by these applications. These are the questions that become very difficult to answer “on the fly” when you have an urgent need to understand those dependency mappings.

Many of these data centers especially in the financial sector simply cannot afford to have any downtime. They must resolve any problems very quickly. This requires complete visibility into their systems and the infrastructure that supports their systems. For a data center manager, understanding the relationships between the assets and the infrastructure – dependency mapping – is extremely important.

A Dynamic View of Your Data Center’s Capacity

A very important topic in data centers today is capacity management and capacity planning.

Capacity planning is a simple as arithmetic. It is the total provisioned infrastructure minus the consumed resources and infrastructure. The total provisioned infrastructure in the data center is usually very static can be documented relatively easily by the architects and engineers who designed and built your data center. That’s the total size of your data center – how much power you have available; how many network switches and ports you have; how many power strips you have; how much power you have available to every rack; all of this is static information.

But data centers are never static

What’s very difficult to get a handle on is the number of resources that are in use at any point in time. That is a very dynamic set of information, and you can only get a handle on it if you have a system that can look at your data center from a holistic point of view and keep track of what goes in and out, what resources are in use, what’s connected and what’s disconnected.

So for data center managers to know the available data center capacity at any point in time, they must know the total provisioned infrastructure, which is relatively static, minus what’s in use at any point in time, which is very dynamic.

Without a DCIM solution, it’s impossible to get an immediate handle on these dynamic changes in the data center. Data center mangers don’t have the tools to easily track network and power connectivity. And if they don’t track the connectivity that means they don’t track those infrastructure resources that are in use at any point in time. Manual tools such as spreadsheets and Visio cannot keep track of this very dynamic set of information. Even data center management software tools that do not incorporate good connectivity management practices do not enable data center managers to accurately calculate their data centers’ capacity.

Raritan can help. Raritan’s DCIM solution is unlike any other and offers:

1. Complete, all-in-one software solution
2. Asset, connectivity, capacity, and change management
3. Power, energy, and environment management

Click here to learn more.

Click here to join our group on Linkedin.

Free passes available for end users - November 27th DCD Toronto

Dorothy Ochs
November 20, 2012

End users are invited to attend the upcoming DatacenterDynamics Toronto show on November 27th. Stop by our booth to see our latest solutions and enter a raffle drawing for a new iPad. Simply contact us if you would like a free pass. \

For more information, visit http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conferences/2012/toronto-2012.

Google's Data Center

Greg More
October 23, 2012

Google was in the news this week wasn’t it? First, there was the intentional release of photos from inside their data center and stories about their data centers from journalists such as Steven Levy. Then there was the unintentional premature earnings release by RR Donnelley indicating earnings per share of $9.03 instead of the market expectation of $10.65 causing the stock price to fall $68.10 or 9% before trading was halted.

Scattered among the many photos of Google data centers were a few Easter eggs*. My  favorite was the “Super Secret Strategic PUE Plan.” I’ve checked with our Power IQ energy management software product manager to learn whether Power IQ can calculate a PUE less than 1.0. He assures me that if Google can achieve a PUE less than 1.0 our Power IQ will be able to calculate it.

According to the May 2009 “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines” by Googlers Urs Holzle and Luiz Barroso, “The computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator but a warehouse full of computers … We must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer.”

The “one massive warehouse-scale computer” is composed of what Raritan has articulated as the concept of “smart racks.” A data center, whether a room or an entire building, is all about what is happening at the rack. Obviously, this is where the actual computing is taking place. It is also where the vast majority of the power is being consumed, or should be. It is the web of communications within the data center, within the organization, and for communications with the rest of the world. If this kingdom of IT is not properly protected and maintained there can be very serious consequences.

If you would like to learn more about smart racks, read the Raritan smart racks article.

*source: www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/10-easter-eggs-from-inside-a-google-data-center-20121018/ . You can see more Easter eggs at: https://mashable.com/2012/10/18/google-data-center-easter-eggs/.

Complimentary passes available for end users for the October 16th DCD Chicago show

Dorothy Ochs
October 9, 2012

End users are invited to attend the upcoming DatacenterDynamics Chicago on October 16th. Attend our presentation featuring Bank of Canada and stop by our booth to see our latest solutions and enter a raffle drawing for a new iPad. Simply contact us.

Presentation Details

• Time: 12:50 - 13:30
• Location: Hall 2
• Speakers: Jeff Birch (Senior IT Principal Consultant, Bank of Canada) & Khaled Nassoura
• Title: This is the real deal, a real-world experience of a financial institution choosing and implementing a DCIM solution.
• Abstract: There has been a lot of buzz, hype, and confusion around DCIM (data center infrastructure management) software that has been created by both vendors and industry analysts in the past year. In this session, you will learn directly from data center architects and managers how they went about selecting a DCIM solution suite to bridge the gap between facilities and IT, streamline the process for moves/adds/changes, increase asset tracking accuracy, and reduce costs in their data center

Event Website: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conferences/2012/chicago-2012

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