DCIM: An Integral Part of the Software Defined Data Centre

Increased Resiliency - Improved Operational Efficiencies - Reduced Energy Costs

Data Centre Infrastructure Management

DCIM: An Integral Part of the Software Defined Data Centre

Michael Rudgyard, CTO & Founder, Concurrent [email protected]



Who we are and what we do…



• Young, dynamic company, formed in 2010– Based in Birmingham, UK

– Private; funded by venture capital

• We develop an intuitive, end-to-end DCIM solution

• Company Vision– To establish Concurrent COMMAND as the DCIM of choice for both the

technical and commercial management of data centres

Company profile



USPs / Key Differentiators

• An end-to-end approach– Integration across all systems delivers a complete view of data centre performance

• Vendor neutral– Supports all of your existing and future infrastructure

• Architected to scale– Meets the needs of both small, large and multi-site data centres

• An intuitive and highly dynamic GUI– Key Performance Indicators drive efficiency– Critical alerting, technical fault-finding and planning

• An open framework– Ensures that managers can customise the product to meet their precise requirements



So what is DCIM ?



The Evolution of DCIM

Building & Facilities Management

Facilities IT Systems

DCIM arguably started as Data Centre Facilities Management …




Power Chain / Energy Monitoring



Then energy management…




Environmental Monitoring




With an initial focus on cooling…








Server health monitoring

Vendors then realised that servers provided lots of power & environmental data themselves …






Building & Facilities Management OS/VM monitoring



While reports claimed that the biggest waste of energy in the data centre was due to underutilised servers…




Asset Management



Building & Facilities Management OS/VM monitoring



Which required knowing what and where these servers were…




Asset Management

Cable Management




Capacity Planning

OS/VM monitoring



Knowing what is where, as well as space, power, cooling and network requirements, allows you to plan…




Asset Management

Cable Management




Capacity Planning

Network & storage monitoring

Application monitoring

OS/VM monitoring



Knowing the power, and CPU, network, IO (and even application) usage, allows you to truly understand end-to-end efficiency …




Asset Management

Cable Management




Capacity Planning



OS/VM monitoring



VM migration

While active control of cooling, power distribution and IT resources can bring even greater savings …



The business case for DCIM



Improve resilience and reduce risk

Increase operational efficiencies

Drive energy savings

Business Drivers



Reducing Risk

Asset Management

Cable Management




Capacity Planning



OS/VM monitoring



VM migration



Improving Operational Efficiencies

Asset Management

Cable Management




Capacity Planning



OS/VM monitoring



VM migration



Driving Energy Savings

Asset Management

Cable Management




Capacity Planning



OS/VM monitoring



VM migration



Data Centre Efficiency



It’s all about virtualization

It’s all about cooling

It’s all about planning

It’s about staff efficiency

What defines an efficient Data Centre ?



Energy

“Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner”

Sep 22nd, 2012 Power, Pollution and the Internet

• The Energy Problem: – Energy is a critical issue for the fast-growing data centre industry

– Cost of energy is substantial and growing fast (1.5-2% of global electricity)

– Significant political pressure to reduce carbon emissions



Reducing ‘Facility’ overheads; PUE

• The data centre industry initially focussed on reducing cooling (and other) overheads

• A measure of this is the Power Usage Effectiveness:

Total power used by the Data Centre

PUE = ---------------------------------Power used by IT equipment



Virtualisation

• Virtualisation shifts the focus to server rationalisation

• However, virtualisation often takes place:– With few changes to the power and cooling infrastructure (the PUE increases !!)– With little historical knowledge of server utilisation pre-virtualisation



Design vs. Operational Efficiency

• Most new data centres are currently designed against PUE targets– For a given IT hardware capacity, PUE is a good planning metric

• But what if the servers are not doing any useful work in practise ??• PUE is actually a very poor operational metric

• We really need a measure of IT Usage Effectiveness

– ie. how effective is the use of power to deliver necessary IT services

– Against which optimisation can be performed for maximum effect



0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

ComputeUtilisation

Effectiveness

StorageUtilisation

Effectiveness

NetworkUtilisation

Effectiveness

• The industry has struggled to define ‘standard’ metrics that are meaningful (eg. PUE, ITUE, ITEE, FVER..)

• DCIM is a tool that should enable a customer to use any standard, and even define his own KPIs

Data Centre KPIs



Optimising for change

DCIM provides hard evidence for making business decisions

• Which servers should be replaced, virtualised or retired ?– Compare utilisation across the estate

• Which servers are better at delivering a particular service ?– Provides useful procurement information

• When should equipment be retired ?– Sweating IT and cooling assets is often a very bad idea indeed !– DCIM can combine power, utilisation, and asset information (eg. depreciation) and

provide solid CAPex vs. OPex arguments for replacing/upgrading assets

• Do I really need to invest in new equipment or a new data centre ?



The Challenges for DCIM



Commercial Challenges

• Facilities and IT are often managed independently– Complicated sell for end-to-end solution, mitigated by having a modular application– However, future data centres are likely to follow a more unified management approach

(cf. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc…)

• Little ‘C’-level visibility of datacentre risks, costs & efficiency – Power is not ‘charged’ to IT; CAPEx decisions are made without evidence; etc…– Ironically, this is what DCIM sets out to achieve !

• Staff do not have the time to implement DCIM – Ironically, DCIM relieves them of many manual tasks once it is in place

• Co-location providers have different needs to their customers– Need for unified DCIM solutions that target both users as this sector grows



Technical Challenges – Product Breadth

• The ever-increasing scope of DCIM– Likely to leave non-specialist (eg. smaller hardware-focussed) providers behind.– Requires a well-thought out product strategy

• Need to support diverse equipment from multiple vendors– Drives a standards-based, agentless approach: eg. SNMP, Modbus, BACnet, 1-wire,

IPMI, WMI etc.



Manage everything, from anywhere

BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485

‘IT’ Ethernet network

Management Ethernet network

1-wire semsornetwork

Protocolconverter




BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485




Facilities management : BMS, branch circuits; UPS systems, generators, CRAC units, environmental sensors etc..

Protocolconverter




BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485





Protocolconverter

Environmental monitoring: low-cost, 1-wire sensors




BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485





PDU & sensor management

Protocolconverter





BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485






Protocolconverter

Rack cooling & access management





BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485






Server health management Protocolconverter






BACnetnetwork

ModbusRS485






Server health management

OS, VM and application monitoring

Protocolconverter





Technical Challenges – Scale Out

• Imagine a high density data-centre with ‘just’ 10,000 servers– ie. 300-500 racks and a similar number of PDUs and sensors

– and up to (say) 16 VMs per server

• You might want to monitor (derive reports from etc..)– 300-1500 environmental sensors

– 20-30 data-points per server (IPMI, Power) = 200k-300k points

– 20-100 data-points per OS/VM (eg. SNMP, WMI) = 3.2M-16M points

– … as well as user and application data.

• That’s of a lot of information if you sample every 10 to 60s!– But ‘scale-out’ data centres can be ten times this size…



Technical Challenges – Scale Out

Things that won’t work (and that we don’t do !):

• Using a ‘single-instance’ software architecture – Information will need to be processed in a distributed manner

• Putting unrefined data in a standard SQL data-base– or you’ll need a data-centre to store, process & retrieve this data !

• Expecting simple GUIs (eg. lists and trees) to be effective– Visualisation becomes a key aspect to usability

– Increased need for automation and data consolidation



Technical Challenges – Scale Across

• Co-location / cloud providers are interested in providing their customers with portals for managing their own systems

• This provides further challenges for DCIM providers:– Providing customers with relevant ‘facilities’ data

– Granular monitoring of data (eg. power usage) in highly dynamic clouds

– Systems that are capable of scaling across many users



The future of DCIM



Where DCIM Meets Cloud


DCIM & Cloud Infrastructure Management is likely to merge…

DCIM

Cloud Infrastructure Management



DCIM & the software-defined data centre

• In the future, we will move to the autonomous data centre– Emphasis moves from monitoring to automated management by software

– Potential for very significant operational and energy savings…

• Real-time optimisation of complete service delivery– Migration of virtual machines based on usage; active power control; localised

cooling etc…



DCIM & the software-defined data centre

• There are numerous potential issues:– Software platforms will need to talk to even more diverse systems

– The software will need to be scalable and able to deal with highly dynamic environments

– The control mechanisms will need to be defined by the data centre managers and IT team, using simple interfaces that abstract complexity

– There are many optimisation constraints relating to: physical issues; the IT, network and storage infrastructure; the required QoS etc..

• But one of the biggest issues is perceived risk..

– Data centres are ‘mission critical’ and highly conservative



Questions ?

Visit our website http://www.concurrent-thinking.com/ for more information

Or fill in our contact form with any enquiries and we will endeavour to reply as quickly as possible.

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