Modius Data Center Blog

The granular management of all assets being placed or moved within a datacenter has become highly desirable over the past several years. Important to note is that most major companies will claim to already solved the asset management needs with an array of typically disconnected and many times complex sets of tabular asset manager products. These same companies are now quietly looking for 'something else' to help get them to where they 'really' need to be... 

The newest generation of asset management suites are focused on visually representing assets with a drag-and-drop approach to adds, moves and changes. These new lifecycle management suites allow equipment to be added, moved or changed in existing facilities in a highly predictable and efficient manner. Examples of these modern suites include Aperture, Altima/Netzoom, Rackwise, nLyte, Avocent, ShowRack, APC, VisualDatacenter, Raritan/dcTrack, FieldView and a handful of others. Each of these management software suites has been crafted to allow complex data centers to be visually articulated with a high degree of fidelity, identifying everything from the manufacturer, model and serial number, to the purchase date, PO number, owner’s name and physical location.

In typical scenario, the user will graphically navigate using a drill-down tool which mimics the ‘Google Earth’ model… starting with very macro views and then selectively drilling-down to progressively more detailed views of smaller areas. In each view, various operational metrics are constantly reported such as ‘power being consumed’ within the current view. Ultimately single discrete values can be displayed.

Historically, these suites have relied on ‘faceplate’ information. This faceplate information is based upon the manufacturer’s published specification for a specific given device. It is usually the maximum value. A 1U web server for instance may have a published faceplate power consumption of 450 Watts, but the actual power draw in normal operation may be a much lower 150Watts or less.  This discrepancy creates the potential for huge errors and inefficiencies when planning for overall capacity and expansion opportunities.

Consequently, one of the newest customer requirements needing to be addressed by EACH of the asset management suite vendors is to add real-time metric data. The desired metric data will obviously include the value for Power consumption, but may also include less intuitive values for fans speeds, inlet and CPU temperature, CPU and RAM utilization, available disk space, etc.  While these values are relatively easy to come by as an individual user of each system, many different technologies must be exercised to programmatically and remotely retrieve these values in real-time.

This is currently where many of the latest generation of visual Asset Managers struggle. While their systems are amazing at handling the visual manipulation of IT assets, moving racks and routers along floorplans and data centers, the systems are simply not built with a large enterprise in mind when it comes to gathering Real-Time metric data. Gathering metric data for 12 servers at a trade-show is very appealing, but doing the same type of metric gathering in production against 12,000 or 112,000 servers is a bigger fish to fry. To do so requires a distributed collection architecture that is purpose built to collect any and all data from any device which is network addressable.

Real-Time monitoring with OpenData is the technology that will support the replacement of these faceplate ‘theoretical’ values with actual observed values… allowing a significantly more accurate view for planning purposes. Modius' OpenData(r) is built on a fully distributed bus architecture, is firewall friendly, and can be deployed easily to provide any asset management tool's need for Real-Time monitoring. OpenData  SUPPORTS rather than replaces Asset Management suites, and has been crafted with API's and Web Services interfaces to allow the OpenData gathered metric data to be CONSUMED by any number of other applications, including the current crop of Visual Asset Managements solutions. The combination of a best-of-breed visual asset management tool with a highly granular metric monitoring solution like Modius OpenData allows business costs to be much more understood and ultimately will allow existing data centers to provide significantly more capacity and increases the lifespan of the data center itself.