Modius Data Center Blog

The challenge with data center capacity management lies not in what to do, but how to do it in a dynamic and complex environment. Traditional data centers typically were housed in one giant room with a single, integrated power and cooling system to service the entire room. This meant the energy expended to cool the room was fairly constant regardless of the actual IT load. Today’s modularized data center architecture is more energy efficient. It is designed to scale with the deployment volume of IT equipment. As IT equipment and computational workloads fluctuate with business demand, so too should the power and cooling of the data center.

Modularization helps the data center’s power and cooling systems run truly proportional to the computational demand and, thus, is less wasteful. By optimizing infrastructure performance, more servers can be supported in the data center with the same power and cooling. To fully appreciate its impact on capacity gains, first consider the how the principles of modularization can be applied throughout the entire facility:

Physical Layout – Just as one manages power usage in a home by turning out the lights in unoccupied rooms, one can also manage data center power. By compartmentalizing the data center into energy zones or modules, with independent controls for power, cooling, and humidity, each module can be independently “lit up” as needed. Modularization can be achieved by erecting walls, hanging containment curtains, or by using pods, i.e., enclosed compartments of IT racks that employ a centralized environmental management system to provide cool air at intake and keep warm air at the exhaust.

IT Systems Architecture – IT infrastructure can be modularized, and should be done in conjunction with IT staff and end-user customers (business units) who own the applications deployed on servers. IT modularization involves grouping together servers, storage, and networking equipment that can be logically deployed in the same module. For example, when business computational demand is low, all corporate applications—such as the corporate intranet, internal email, external Web presence, e-commerce site, ERP applications, and more—can be deployed on the same module while the other modules in the data center remain “unlit” to save energy. As the business grows, more servers can be deployed and additional modules commissioned for IT use. For instance, all corporate intranet applications can be deployed in one module with external applications deployed in another module.

Power and Cooling Infrastructure – Right-sizing the facilities infrastructure follows the modularization of the physical layout. As the modules—zones or pods—are created
for the physical layout, the power and cooling infrastructure are deployed in corresponding units that independently service each module. Separate UPSs, PDUs and power systems, along with CRAC units, condensers, or chillers, are sized appropriately for each module. This allows the scalable expansion of the facilities infrastructure as IT equipment expands.

The principles of modularization summarized above are proven optimization strategies that can extend the life of the data center. Optimizing in near real-time delivers a higher yield from existing resources. It enables us to get more utilization out of power, cooling and space.  

If your data center infrastructure management tools fall short enabling continuous optimization, then let us show you how OpenData can help in this 20-minute Modius OpenData webcast: http://info.modius.com/data-center-monitoring-webcast-demo-by-modius

How to achieve better visibility and control over your data center operations—without the risk.

Veterans of data center operations tell us that having visibility and gaining better control over the critical infrastructure and IT assets throughout their entire facility is the key to maximizing data center efficiency. 

Achieving this requisite visibility is not a trivial task. It involves overcoming the interoperability hurdles of monitoring all of the various critical systems—such as generators, chillers, water pumps, air exchangers, PDUs, power strips, on-board server instrumentation, and more.

On top of that, making sense of the various alarm schemas—which are so vital to maintaining control of data center performance and achieving a higher level of efficiency—can be more of a headache than the alarm system is worth.  They typically don’t factor input from the full gamut of facility and IT equipment into their respective alarm thresholds. Consequently, spurious alerts from the disparate alarm systems trip over themselves and conceal the true state of the data center.

If your work is impeded by spurious alarms…or if you find yourself ignoring low-level alarms because they’re out of context from your overarching data center priorities…or if you cringe at the thought of the time and cost involved in deploying a monitoring and alarm management solution across your entire data center, then Modius can help.

Modius offers OpenData Standard Edition, a low-cost unified alarm management and notification solution for monitoring all power and cooling equipment, including IT racks. At only $1,995 per user per year, it is the only solution in the industry offered at a very low cost and distributed as a downloadable, easy-to-install software package. This low-cost offering reduces the risk of “locking in” to a solution without having it thoroughly tested in your environment, on your own terms.

OpenData interoperates with most network equipment through its support of the essential communications protocols, including SNMP, Modbus and BACnet. It collects and stores performance data, normalizes it, then transforms the data into a simplified, federated view. This means you don’t have to kludge together various point solutions, or contend with different data formats or increments that add complexity to data center management.

And, because of OpenData’s intelligent monitoring capabilities, customers also benefit from a sensible, unified approach to alarm management. The OpenData software matches all monitored performance against configurable thresholds and sends out alarms via a centralized notification engine. Rather than send an overflow of low-level alerts, it only sends the alarms you need when they matter most. This means you can manage your data center as a complete system—instead of disparate components—and get insight to the true state of your data center.

Sign up for a free demo of OpenData Standard Edition today and uncover the true state of your data center in a matter of hours.

In the news recently, there has been a lot of discussion around a new category of software tools focusing on unified facilities and IT management in the data center.  These tools have been labeled by Gartner as Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), of which Modius OpenData is a leading example (according to Gartner).

In reality, there are multiple types of tools in this category - Asset Management systems and Real-time Monitoring systems like Modius.  The easiest way to understand the differences is to reflect on two key elements: 

• How the tools get the data?
• And how time critical is the data?

Generally speaking, data center Asset Management systems, like nlyte, Vista, Asset-Point, Alphapoint, etc., are all reliant on 3^rd party sources to either facilitate data entry of IT device 'face plate' specs, or are fed collected data for post process integration. 

The data processing part is what these systems do very effectively, in that they can build a virtual model of the data center and can often predict what will happen to the model based on equipment 'move, add or change' (MAC). These products are also strong at utilizing that model to build capacity plans for physical infrastructure, specifically power, cooling, space, ports, and weight. 

To ensure that the data used is as reliable as possible the higher priced systems contain full work-flow and ticketing engines. The theory being that by putting in repeatable processes and adhering to them, the MAC will be entered correctly in the system. To this day, I have not seen a single deployed system that is 100% accurate.  But for the purposes they are designed for (capacity and change management), these systems work quite well.

However, these systems are typically not used for real-time alarm processing and notification as they are not, 1) Real-time, and 2) Always accurate.

Modius takes a different approach.  As compared with Asset Management tools, Modius gets its data DIRECTLY from the source (i.e. the device) by communicating in its native protocol (like Modbus, BACnet, and SNMP) versus theoretical 'face plate' data from 3rd party sources.  The frequency of data collection can vary from 1 poll per minute, to 4 times a minute (standard), all the way down to the ½ second.  This data is then collected, correlated, alarmed, stored and can be reported over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years. The main outputs of this data are twofold:

• Centralized alarm management across all categories of equipment (power, cooling, environmental sensors, IT devices, etc.)
• Correlated performance measurement and reporting across various catagories (e.g. rack, row, zone, site, business unit, etc.)

Modius has pioneered real-time, multi-protocol data collection because the system has to be accurate 100% of the time.  Any issue in data center infrastructure performance could lead to a failure that could affect the entire infrastructure.  This data is also essential in optimizing the infrastructure in order to lower cooling costs, increase capacity, and better management equipment.

Both types of tools -- Asset Management tools and Real-time Monitoring systems -- possess high value to data center operators utilizing different capabilities.  The Asset tools are great for planning, documenting, and determining the impacts of changes in the data center.  Modius real-time monitoring interrogates the critical infrastructure to make sure systems are operating correctly, within environmental tolerances, and established redundancies.  Both are complimentary tools in maintaining optimal data center performance.

Because of this inherent synergy, Modius actively integrates with as many Asset Management tools as possible, and supports a robust web services interface for bi-directional data integration. To find out more, please feel free to contact Modius directly at info@modius.com.