Modius Data Center Blog

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.

Here at Modius, we are seeing an increasing number of requests among Co-locations (Co-los) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to help them capture more robust and accurate power measurement data.  In one sense, this trend is nothing new because all data centers—whether captive inside an enterprise or an outsourced service provider—need accurate power measurement, typically for improving:

• Capacity optimization
• Energy efficiency
• Uptime assurance

But we find that Co-lo’s and MSP’s have a special need that takes power reporting to the next level: Providing disaggregated energy consumption and power usage data by customer at a very granular level, often by rack or even a group of servers.  Typically, they need detailed power metering for each customer, principally for:

• More accurate customer billing
• Detailed status reporting to the customer (in real-time) through a customer portal

Customers are now wanting this information not only to be sure their power bills are accurate, but also to try and determine their available power capacity, usage trends, and accurate data to support reporting on PUE and Carbon management.  Or even more of a challenge, they need to unify data across different locations because their customers are spread across several different buildings. 

Theoretically, some of this data can been captured from the servers.  In fact, with distributed systems management tools, reporting on server energy consumption (at the server level) is relatively commonplace.  But this data source is incomplete.  What if you want to factor in cooling and other related energy consumption?  Or what if you also want environmental reporting for bottom/middle/top for each rack?  Now, this is much more challenging …

In general, most Co-Lo’s don’t have access to the server instrumentation data at the chassis level.  And in terms of power and cooling, we’ve found that most co-location providers are still struggling to unify a broad range of equipment into a single monitoring fabric and extend the framework across disparate systems and locations. 

Happily, there are several Co-Lo’s operators taking the initiative by unifying their monitoring of power and cooling equipment with a real-time data center monitoring and measurement system like Modius OpenData.  And many are augmenting power and cooling data by installing new breaker level metering and.  Moreover, many are even using this data to create centralized customer portals to provide their customers with reporting and a real-time view of their power capacity and consumption.  Further, they are adding a layer of analytics and baselines on energy efficiency and reliability. 

As the industry becomes more competitive, service providers cannot continue with business as usual.  Many Co-lo’s and MSP’s have taken this initiative so that they can differentiate themselves, have better visibility on how they can extend their internal resources, and provide PUE and Carbon reporting services to their customers. 

We believe the underlying driver behind this trend is the fact that an increasing number of corporations and enterprises with large IT departments are being tasked by their senior management to provide comprehensive reports on power usage and their relative efficiency, regardless of whether the enterprise owns their own data center facilities or outsource part of their infrastructure. 

Be it end-users, Co-lo’s or MSP’s, everyone is increasingly looking to software providers like Modius to solve the comprehensive measurement and reporting problem, and we believe they are finding that Modius OpenData is the right product at the right time and value.