Defining Automation in the Data Center

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.