Why data centre providers can no longer afford to ignore DCIM

Data Centre Infrastructure Management, or DCIM, brings together facilities and IT management software in the data centre to provide customers with a transparent solution to manage their energy consumption and storage space. Comprehensive DCIM deployment uses specialised software, hardware and sensors within the data centre to give customers the ability to monitor and control their usage as if they were at the data centre themselves.

DCIM gives customers transparency, the ability to scale up and down and the ability to reduce costs, making data centres that offer DCIM a very attractive option for businesses. The commercial reasons for adopting DCIM are therefore very compelling and the technology isn’t new – it’s been around for at least the last five years. So we’re compelled to ask the question – why has the uptake of DCIM in the UK and abroad been slow?

The DCIM Landscape

A recent MarketScape report by IDC in 2015 suggested that the DCIM market will grow at a compound annual rate of about 16 percent between 2014 and 2019. This is a steady number, but there are still millions upon millions of racks that have not yet utilised DCIM, leaving a huge opportunity for businesses everywhere to benefit from the rich analytics that it offers, enabling them to both enhance efficiency and save money.

However, offering DCIM and getting customers to understand and use it are two very different challenges. Although it’s a fairly straightforward technology, if customers don’t know what it is and how it can save on their power usage and overall costs, there’s a risk it will be overlooked and under-utilised, as is evident at the moment.

That’s not the only issue though, as the ability to flex power and usage requirements up and down come into direct conflict with many commercial data centre models, which rely on long term, costly and inflexible contracts to safeguard their operations.

This means that having DCIM under these conditions becomes ineffective unless customers have the power to amend their contracted usage commitments to reflect actual real-time usage.

DCIM is driving change

Over the last twenty years, the business world has become increasingly digital in focus. Online interactions have a genuine impact on business performance and the economy; and underpinning it all are data centres. As a result, their role has undergone a revolutionary transition and they are now considered as critical infrastructure powering the digital economy.

Given the increased reliance of business on data centres, the space, power and cooling demands placed on them have also increased exponentially.

In March 2015, Peter Greaves, Expertise Leader at Aurecon, claimed that data centres are responsible for consuming three percent of all the electricity produced globally each year; and left unchecked, this will continue to increase.

As such, data centre providers and customers need to collaborate and examine how they can work together to increase efficiencies – reducing spiralling energy consumption and cost. 

DCIM is one way of facilitating this collaboration. Traditionally, data centre providers have been quick to highlight if customers need to buy more capacity, but not as quick to advise when to scale down requirements. DCIM creates this visibility and puts the control firmly back into the power of the customer – giving them greater visibility into their daily usage and allowing them to manage their capacity in real-time and act on the analytics. 

However, this is only useful if they have the flexibility to scale down their contracts in the event that they’re not using the initially agreed amounts. Several innovative providers are already offering this capability and actually using DCIM to create new commercial models, which makes choosing the right intelligent data centre provider more critical than ever.

Overcoming the challenges and finding the value

The benefits of DCIM are obvious for customers, but barriers to adoption still remain. This is particularly true for older generation data centres, not originally designed for DCIM, which struggle to install it retrospectively due to prohibitive costs.

Issues over cost are further complicated by the fact that DCIM spans both IT and Facilities - two areas which don’t normally overlap. This has been known to create disagreements, for example, over whose budget should be used to pay for DCIM, with neither side stepping up to take responsibility.

It’s understandable that some operators may see risk. Creating and offering a robust DCIM solution can mean a significant investment of time and money, with no guarantee that customers are going to buy the service from their provider. So who says it needs to be sold?

DCIM is becoming an essential part of the intelligent data centre. It shouldn’t be seen as an add-on, but something that is integral. With more customers come more demands and they will expect their providers to offer the most advanced solutions available.

But then where’s the value for providers? If providers are offering an effective DCIM solution, and not charging for it, then not only will this attract CIOs, but also CFOs – both of which need to be onside when making important IT decisions. CIOs have the expertise, but they need CFOs onside to believe in and finance their decisions, making the CFO just as vital in some cases.

Supplying visibility also creates value to providers – it creates trust and strengthens the customer relationship. Rather than a perceived fear that DCIM reduces the control of operators, it is simply a realigning of focus – giving the customer access to what is rightfully theirs. The customer’s IT consumes the power and therefore the data on that consumption is theirs, so why shouldn’t they be provided with a mechanism to both monitor and control it?

Sharing the benefit

Data centres are no longer just a black box used for computing, they now have the opportunity to be agile and react to what is actually happening.  But to make this a genuine reality, operators need to meet their customers half way, which will result in shared benefit. 

Through the use of DCIM, operators can ensure that they only use the amount of power that customers actually require. Most importantly, customers are able to analyse their usage and scale up and down accordingly to ensure maximum efficiency – and in some cases, make substantial savings. 

The transparency that DCIM facilitates will allow the relationship between data centre providers and their customers to become more honest, open and flexible. This increased trust could be greatly beneficial for both parties. With so much to gain, the data centre industry can no longer afford to ignore DCIM.