NASHVILLE, Tenn.—At Data Center World 2010 here in Music City, it's all about control.
We're talking control of data center footprints, carbon emissions,
power consumption, equipment cooling, budgets, personnel, and myriad
other things. Oh, yes: Control of the data itself also comes into this
discussion.
Data center managers are finding themselves as backstops in the middle of a huge
data surge, and it has to be kept under control. If it isn't, lots of
valuable information will be lost, and in some cases, lost forever.
Businesses can't afford that to happen.
Thus, IT managers and C-level executives with responsibility for an
enterprise's IT are gaining more and more value all the time, largely
because of all the new IT that is coming into place to enable business
to work more efficiently. And all that new IT needs to be controlled.
One federal-government IT manager, who asked that his name not be used
for this story, said that he and his staff at his data center know
where their specific data is and how to access it all, but he also said
that he knows of other agencies that have no idea exactly where their
second- and third-tier data exists—whether it's on tape, disk or paper.
With the ever-increasing virtualization of hardware and software as
data centers undergo facelifts and upgrades, more and more data is
being literally spread to the corner of the Earth, and it's being
broken up into chunks to protect its integrity. That may sound strange,
that that's what happens in virtual machines and VM data storage.
The No. 1 most talked-about product genre at Data Center World is data
center management software. Avocent, Aperture, AccessIT, BMC, EMC,
Dell, Methode, nLyte, Aptare, Modius, Rackwise—those are just some of
the companies coming to the fore with interesting products and services.
They all have one thing in common: enabling visibility into
various parts of a data center so that managers can make sure
everything's running as it should run. Some, such as Aperture, feature
self-healing-type software that uses business intelligence to
anticipate possible problems with servers or networking in a data
center.
eWEEK has published a slide show highlighting some of these companies. Go here to check out some pictures.
Emerson's Aperture unveiled its new management package during this show. Go here to read details.
Rackwise also unveiled its latest product, Data Center Manager Version 3.5, at the AFCOM conference.
"Rackwise does with software what other vendors in the market today do
with services," said Rackwise Director of Product Managment Bill
Nelson. "This allows users to customize Rackwise to their needs,
integrate with best-of-breed solutions already in their data center or
network operations, and skip the rigid process required by other
software and services packages.
"V3.5 can be deployed anywhere in the world remotely, and is fully functional within a matter of days."
This is where management software is going. Ideally, new-gen management
software will work with legacy equipment, play nicely with all major
platforms, is Web-based and portable, and isn't complicated to install
and operate.
Also, it's nice if the package includes business analytics and reporting; many of them do.
Rackwise, which is a prime example of this new software, also includes:
- Business service management, which analyze operational costs of
business services by geographical location, customer, application, or
any custom property;
- Charge-back reporting, which charges back departments and
customers by space, power, CPU utilization, or any user-defined metric,
thus ensuring absolute accuracy;
- Capacity forecasting, which watches and records trending on
capacity and predicts future depletion date of power, space, cooling
and weight.
For more information on Rackwise, go here.
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