iTRACS >> Products & Solutions >> Data Center Management

Data Center Management

Despite the many advances in data center monitoring and management technologies, when it comes to the physical infrastructure most organizations are still in the Dark Ages.

Consider that most organizations still use spreadsheets or other personal productivity tools to perform these functions. Quite frankly, it’s difficult to maintain critical information with a high degree of accuracy with these tools. They’re also wasteful since they require a substantial duplication of effort by many people.

On the provisioning side, it’s not unusual for various groups involved in managing the data center (such as SAN, LAN, facilities and operations) to build their own business processes for equipment provisioning.

These manual processes and tools can cause a host of problems. Consider these questions:

• Can you immediately assess the impact of loss of connectivity for low or high voltage connections?
• Do you know which apps on your servers are connected to which PDUs?
• If you plan to disconnect a fiber patch cord from your SAN do you know which hosts (& apps) will lose their storage?
• Can you improve the ROI on the investments you have made in enterprise apps such as asset and incident management by extending their capabilities to provide asset connectivity documentation?
• Do you spend valuable technician time manually labeling removable assets and their connections in the data center?

If you answered “no” to the first four questions, and/or “yes” to the last one, it’s time to change the way your data center operates.

iTRACS Corporation provides an enterprise scalable Asset Connectivity Management Solution that enables large enterprises to establish and manage best practices for provisioning and managing data center assets. This solution eliminates the need for spreadsheets and other manual methods to document and control changes to physical infrastructure in the data center.

iTRACS’ solution is not a replacement for other enterprise applications that might be used for incident management, asset/ inventory management and monitoring & control. Instead, it enhances the value of these tools by:

• Showing graphically how all assets are connected by low or high voltage cabling (LAN, SAN, KVM, power, copper, fiber, etc.
• Describing the asset’s precise physical location (e.g. a junction box with a connection from circuit 1 on pdu23 sits underneath floor tile 147/ 23 or that patch panel port 14 is in patch panel 23 in rack 2 in the frame in room 2 in the second floor in the data center on south street, etc).

It’s easy to transition to the iTRACS solution. Its processes and methodologies allow data to be imported into the database from spreadsheets, asset/ inventory/ facilities systems, auto-discovery tools, etc.

When the database is created it completely describes all intelligent (switches, routers, storage, servers, cards) and passive (racks, patch panels, floor tiles, cable management bars, cabinets, power strips, slots) assets, right down to their connections and physical locations, But unlike traditional asset or facility management software that may incorporate data fields to show utilized port connectivity, the iTRACS database shows complete end-to-end circuit connectivity thru the structured cabling or high voltage power environment for all available circuits.

This database structure showing available, unused circuits, allows equipment provisioning, decommissioning or movement by technicians responsible for LAN, SAN, facilities, operations, etc.

As a true enterprise application, iTRACS’ solution is easily integrated with other data center technologies that provide asset and incident management and monitoring and control. This integration is done using either the iTRACS API or an industry standard ODBC. Asset management and facilities data can be stored in the database or retrieved interactively from another database, helping assure the accuracy of connectivity data. General work orders from enterprise ticketing systems such as Remedy can be set to trigger specific work orders in the ITRACS solution, enabling auto-provisioning of available circuits (copper, fiber, KVM, Power, etc.) as well as floor or rack space. Individual work actions with exact connectivity instructions (e.g. insert patch cord between these two fiber ports) can be allocated to technicians. Completion confirmation can be returned to the master ticketing system.

iTRACS’ solution also provides a better return on monitoring and control systems by providing the ability to store data historically against the assets in the database. The system can be configured to integrate with intelligent power strips and environmental monitors; trending data can be illustrated graphically to aid in capacity utilization and planning.

iTRACS’ solution can be configured to meet the unique requirements of each enterprise including customer-specific reports and searches, unique customer specific equipment, user definable access rights and privileges, etc.