Are You Choosing The Right DCIM for CoLos

Powered by phenomenal rise in mobile penetration, data and broadband services and riding high on demand for Cloud Services, India is a growing market for CoLocationDatacenters.Gartner predicts the colocation and hosting market in India will be worth $1.3bn by 2016. It is an emerging trend in multiple sectors with Banks and Government being two major sectors fuelling CoLocationDatacenter growth in India. While the upswing in demand provides unmatched opportunities to CoLo enterprises, the competition for the fast crowding market space is getting more intense. It is no more enough to offer price differential alone; clients are now demanding value beyond the proverbial dollar.

Factors driving DCIM growth in CoLocation data centers

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Solutions are now providing CoLo managers opportunities to build differentiation. CoLo managers are challenged to deliver cost advantage while providing holistic managed services to their clients including real time reporting, risk alerts and flexibility to upscale or downscale operations, which can be addressed by choosing the right DCIM solution. The Indian DCIM market has grown over 300% in past 5 years – from INR 150 crore to nearly INR 500 crore in 2015. Sectors like BFSI, government, IT/Telecom and Ecommerce will add further to this accelerated growth. However, most players in the market providing standardized services, are making it difficult to choose the right DCIM solution for optimal advantage.

Here are the top considerations for the CoLo Managers to choose the right DCIM for their operations:

• Scalability: The CoLocationDatacenters are going through evolution phase with rising complexities in business and exponential increase in data computing and analyses. With storage and servers getting highly sophisticated, the DCIM solutions too need to match them in their ability to scale and manage. The rightDCIM solution should be able to monitor, measure, manage as well as control energy consumption of all IT-related equipment (e.g. servers, storage and network switches etc). In addition, it should be able to manage facilities infrastructure components including power distribution units [PDUs] and computer room air conditioners [CRACs]. Solutions that combine both IT and Facilities infrastructure management, bridging the gap between the two and offer interoperability with other application as against working in silos, are to be opted for. An increase in CoLo uptake should be easily accommodated by the DCIM they use.
• Holistic, Consolidated Data Management: Today, organizations use multiple applications to manage their data flow and looking for an integrated approach for a seamless experience and as such are getting averse to silos in the infrastructure management. Most organizations prefer a common portal based information system where various applications and infrastructure feeds can be steamed.
• In-depth Real-time Reporting: Customers today demand granular, in-depth and real-time insights on monitoring and analysis of systems, power and cooling, and environmental parameters. This enables them to take informed steps at any point of time, minimizing risk and optimizing their ability to access information on the go. The traditional monitoring solutions are high on cost and low on operational efficiency with limited focus on only select group of devices. Robust DCIM solutions not only provide alert mechanism to tackle immediate issues but go a step further in actually enabling real-time data to be captured, analysed and reported for swift, informed and intelligent decision making in the best interest of the data center infrastructure.
• Security: Given the intricacy and confidentiality of the data that CoLocationDatacenters store, data security is of topmost importance for CoLo managers. The focus has to be on eliminating process risks and aiding integration of data and services to ensure there is no lapse in security.
• Agility and Customizability: One size fits all solution does not fit here. Given the challenging business environment and increasing pressure on data security, companies have unique challenges. DCIM solutions, today must be customized to your requirement and offer quantifiable benefits. There is a need to reduce time to access the data and take action, and this can be achieved by matching the workflow of specific datacenters and processes of its clients. The solutions should be agile to meet the reporting and monitoring needs of various clients of a CoLocationDatacenter.

Looking beyond the obvious benefits / The ROI for businesses

Colocation facilitates organizations to derive benefit from faster networking and resilient connectivity at a considerable cost. In such an environment, the organisations have full control over their own assets thereby increasing their business potential. A colocation offers diverse opportunities providing organizations with added levels of risk management and the chance to invest in better equipment and state-of-the-art servers. And to top it up, DCIM solutions deployed within a CoLocationDatacenter allow the organizations to align their IT infrastructure to the business objectives and enable them to optimize ROI.

System-generated reports provide visibility into racks showing the details exactly what devices they own and where they are located in the data center. It helps them upscale or downscale accordingly, without impacting running applications and providing them with ready insights to plan for future infrastructure updates. All these together ensure optimal equipment utilization.

Besides, DCIM helps in optimizing power and energy consumption. An ideal DCIM solution will provide granular data on power consumption pattern of each equipment in a CoLocationDatacenter at any point of time enabling the organization to pre-empt any excess or sudden drop.

The right DCIM solution offers all its customers within a colocation access to real time data along with the convenience of offshore monitoring.

In short, DCIM allows organizations the flexibility of using a shared datacenter while retaining real time visibility and operational management of their assets, networking and energy utlilization.