Rack power distribution specialist Raritan has launched a major new release of its data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software that the company says includes a highly interactive data center map, a bidirectional workflow engine, and other new automated capabilities to make data centers easier to manage, healthier, and more resource-efficient. The company says the DCIM software's new interactive data center map delivers a single window into capacity resources, such as space, power, cooling weight, network ports and power connections.
According to the company, the map's easy-to-understand red, yellow and green indicators show data center capacities and health. A new inspector widget provides details of budgeted capacities and real-time measured utilization and enables users to drill down quickly for trend analysis and information correlation. Additionally, the new software's automated alerts and reports help warn data center operators of potential capacity and health issues, such as exceeding power capacity threshold, loss of redundancy and hot spot formation.
Raritan's new DCIM release also automates a number of processes in order to improve workflow performance and to optimize data center resources and uptime. According to the company, these process automation updates are as follows:
-- Bidirectional Workflow Engine. This feature further automates the change management process involved when equipment is added or moved from a cabinet. It provides tighter integration between Raritan DCIM and ITMS solutions, such as BMC and ServiceNow, to support the workflows involved in change and trouble-report tickets.
-- Enhanced Analytics and New Automated Reports. These new capabilities generate and distribute automatically key data center reports, such as energy bill-back reports by customer, reports identifying ghost and power-hog servers, and monthly peak power reports. Users can quickly build custom, formatted reports using auto-create, -schedule, and -email distribution functions.
-- Quick Move. Select and quickly move assets to a desired location with support from a new Intelligent Capacity Search feature that recommends ideal asset placement locations based on how much space, power, cooling and connectivity is in a cabinet. With Quick Move, all disconnect and reconnect change requests are automatically validated and issued to ensure a successful move. The DCIM system captures all requests and work orders in an audit log.
-- Automatic Alert Notifications of Cabinet-Level Events. The new DCIM release expands threshold violation alerts to the cabinet-monitoring layer. It warns of cabinet threshold violations, such as capacity levels.
Raritan's DCIM software has a simple pay-as-you-grow pricing structure based on the number of data center cabinets. The solution’s easy-to-use import wizard, auto discovery, rich visualization, specialized analytics and automated reporting capabilities are all designed to support easy deployment of the solution and to enable data center professionals to get answers to their questions quickly. The new DCIM software release also supports rack transfer switches, including Raritan's new switch, which the company claims has one of the fastest load transfer times in the industry.
"IDC's recent research and interviews with data center customers show that interest in DCIM is growing among data centers of all sizes, and we are seeing a higher adoption rate of DCIM solutions this year," asserts Jennifer Koppy, research manager at IDC. "DCIM solutions -- such as Raritan's solution -- help organizations do more with their data center resources by providing operations insight and automating key manual tasks so that work is done quickly and accurately. Not only do DCIM solutions gather, analyze and provide real-time useful information on a data center's infrastructure, they reduce the risk of downtime by warning of potential issues before they become major problems."
Learn more about Raritan's DCIM platform.