What Does a True Data Center Management as a Service Solution Look Like? Pt III

Cloudify your data center with InCommand

Three Part Blog Series

The days of data center FM or IT management  – but never both! – are gone.

How often have you heard this phrase regarding IT: “If it is not measured, it is not managed”? Though overused in the early days of DCIM, the message rings true. (Especially when you consider that, as often as not, all that was being monitored was a very specific part of the data center facilities management (FM) operation. We’ve come a long way!)

“A continuously evolving cloud hosted service.”

A holistic data center management as a service (DMaaS) solution must work across multiple disciplines in the data center. These span not just IT and FM equipment but also people and processes.

As a continuously evolving cloud hosted service, InCommand DMaaS provides oversight and management of FM operations, FM DCIM, change control and management, CMMS and IT DCIM.

It provides an FM NOC, offering consolidated alerts and alarms from all monitored systems to streamline intelligent alarm prioritization and alarm resolution tracking.

FM Ops to IT DCIM

In FM operations terms, InCommand takes care of data center crews by managing shift schedules, rounds and turnover. It informs service vendor management and client billing.

By handling infrastructure moves, adds and changes tracking in FM operations, it feeds into change control and management, providing access tracking, badge tracking, remote hands requests and approvals. This extends to shipping/receiving tracking and customer MEP maintenance notifications and approvals.

Its CMMS provides MEP asset lists; MEP maintenance schedules; MEP servicing vendors and MEP maintenance ticketing.

 

For FM DCIM, InCommand provides monitoring around MEP, environmental sensors and power/space/cooling.

 

For IT DCIM, InCommand DMaaS manages room/rack layouts, IT device lists, IT data cable tracking from switch port to device interface, and rack elevation.

 

In shared environments, it can measure power utilization by customer across the UPS, PDU, panel, circuit and rack.

 

It provides IT power/space/cooling planning algorithms. It handles IT moves/adds/changes ticket tracking and approvals.

 

To provide resilience planning, InCommand issues power outage impact reports and switch outage impact reports. It can even be used to track IT storage and IT equipment lifecycles.

InCommand-DMaaS-working-on-data-center-operations-scaled

The InCommand platform features list is unrivaled in the DMaaS market. And it works thanks to the accuracy, timeliness and veracity of the data.

“Optimize for power efficiency and maximize utilization.”

From the cloud, as a cloud, for the cloud

As a 24/7 cloud service, InCommand data is always up to date. It allows operators to see exactly what is happening across every data center at a granular level.

For operators, this means taking the guess work out of planning.

The impact of any change can be assessed in advance.

But more than that, it means having the ability to constantly optimize for power efficiency and maximize utilization without risking availability and reliability.

Today’s data center workloads are constantly in flux. InCommand allows the operator to be responsive to changing requirements, but also to be analytical about how facilities are behaving across multiple facilities right down to individual components.

And because it provides alerts and prioritizes alarms through a 24/7/365 NOC staffed with onsite expertise and event history-fed machine learning algorithms, the platform enables rapid response to any outages. This preventive functionality can stop escalation and allow for predictive maintenance and pre-break fix interventions.

InCommand DMaaS gives data center operators the confidence of a full solution wraparound across IT and FM. And it scales to monitor data centers across the globe and across all cloud types.

InCommand should not just be considered as a management solution for physical sites. It is a true DMaaS cloud service, which doesn’t simply monitor equipment in your data center but manages the FM and IT, whether on prem, in a Serverfarm data center, in any other third-party data center or across any cloud platform.

Read the first two parts of this three part blog series.

  1. Demystifying DMaaS – What makes InCommand Data Center Management as a Service (DMaaS) different from DCIM?
  2. InCommand: Cracking the Code for Data Center Operations
  3. What Does a True Data Center Management as a Service Look Like?