Or to put it another way:

Shrink a two-hour task down to 15 minutes.

These are the kinds of efficiency gains with Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) that have Gary Bunyan pretty excited. Gary is a Global DCIM Solutions Specialist with iTRACS^® and in his recent column for Data Center Knowledge, Gary shared his enthusiasm about what DCIM can mean to a user organization.

Gary talked about three different customers and how they’re able to leverage the inherent flexibility of DCIM with Interactive 3D Visualization to match their own specific infrastructure management needs.

As Gary writes, “These customers get it – when the DCIM environment is flexible enough to adapt its tools and workflows to the client needs – rather than forcing them to adapt to its own – this gives customers a great chance at some early quick wins and a rapid payback. They’re free to fluidly explore and use the solution in any way they prefer, literally on-the-fly, leveraging its database and tool set to uncover information and drive efficiency in ways that were, frankly, unimaginable before.”

So how did one of Gary’s customers, a U.S.-based enterprise organization, achieve a 87% time savings using DCIM?

Gary explains it as follows:

“They had been using a manual process to put together work orders for technicians to carry on the floor when making moves, adds and changes to the data center infrastructure. It was a laborious two-hour process to pump out 50 of these work actions, and the technicians ended up with notes, spreadsheets and other materials to sift through as they tried to figure out which server goes where, power connectivity, network connectivity and so on. It was a productivity killer.

With DCIM’s automated commissioning engine, however, those 50 work actions can now be created in less than 15 minutes. Using an array of DCIM functions integrated into a process that fits the customer’s defined requirements, the customer simply tells the DCIM software what to do, and it does the rest:

• Finds the right space for the physical asset – where it goes
• Determines the power connectivity, including redundant power as needed
• Determines the network connectivity – exactly what cable goes into which port, etc.
• Outputs the work orders with clear step-by-step directions, including visuals to make sure there can be no misinterpretation
• Lets the customer share the work orders with other constituents via CSV, reports, or other formats
• Provides automatic updates of work progress and status”

This sounds like the kind of efficiency breakthrough EVERYONE can get excited about. Read Gary’s full column here.

Every successful, innovation-driven company has an “ah-ha” moment. The moment when the company realizes that it is special.

It goes something like this: Ah-ha! We are able to see, understand, and solve a business challenge differently from – and better than – our competitors. Because of our analytic insight (understand better), predictive foresight (predict the future better), and operational excellence (execute better), we’re able to fashion a solution that simply works better. A solution that drives more business value for our customers – faster and with greater quantifiable benefit – than the alternatives.

This “ah-ha” moment represents an amazing touchpoint in the life of an innovator. It is an affirmation that the innovator is on the right track and that its mission – to create transformational value for its customers – is being achieved.

Seeing and understanding

Tom Reedy is Chairman of the Board of iTRACS. Recently, he took a moment to remember his company’s big “ah-ha.”

Tom: “There have been a lot of ah-ha moments for iTRACS. But there’s one that really stands out. We’re fortunate to have relationships with some of the world’s true thought leaders. I was in a dialog down in our Arizona offices with one of our clients – one of the world’s leading Internet companies. And during our conversation he said, ‘The data center is the manufacturing floor of the 21st century.’”

Tom pauses, smiling. “And I had to stop for a minute and reflect on that. I grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time around the auto industry. I understood what a manufacturing floor was. And I had never quite thought of a data center like that. But when he put forth that idea – it hit me. A data center is a manufacturing floor. Look at the challenges that a Ford has – running their assembly line, the supply chain, and all of the processes that need to be managed.”

“Our client has the same challenges running his massive data centers. It’s all about automation, efficiency, precision, and agility. Everything that our Data Center Infrastructure Management platform delivers. The client saw all of this, how iTRACS could help him manage his factory floor, his data centers, with the precision of seeing and understanding everything that goes on in there within a single-pane view.”

“And I thought – yes, iTRACS is definitely the right solution at the right place at the right time.”

So what’s YOUR “ah-ha” moment? Feel free to share.

When you think of automation in the data center, what capabilities come to mind? What do you need?

Try this: You need a miracle because you were just handed a mandate – in 10 days, 200 new servers supporting a new business initiative need to be racked and commissioned.

Normally, facing a challenge like this, you and your team would have to walk the data center floor for hours. You’d be looking for space, trying to figure out how to support the new business without impacting your live environment (and existing business clients), and hoping you and your team don’t make a potentially catastrophic mistake in planning, configuration, power, or network connectivity.

We all know the feeling. That pit in your stomach that tells you this is not going to be a normal business week.

But this is not 10 years ago. Today, there is an alternative. Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software with interactive 3D visualization can show you all of the possible locations where the new servers could go. It can filter the racks by space, power, and network capacity, displaying a colored-coded map of suggested destinations. It can do this automatically – giving you reliable answers about which racks:

• have available space
• are unreserved
• have available kWs
• have connections to redundant PDUs
• have available network ports to match the application network profile

have access to secondary power sources

Once the destinations are chosen, the software can automatically replicate the planning for each server and organize the complete deployment. It can then create a complete work schedule detailing where and how the 200 servers should go in.

The software can crunch the information for you.