ManageEngine Enters DCIM Arena By Adding Facilities Management

ManageEngine has added facilities management to its IT management and integrated it as a full DCIM suite. The new offering, dubbed IT360, enables real-time management of both IT and facilities infrastructure components from a single console.

New features like workflow automation, network change and configuration, and a 3-D rack builder have also been added. The data center plays an increasingly important role in the enterprise, and ManageEngine has expanded to help manage the entire data center infrastructure.

“Energy management rivals IT management as one of the major challenges in running an efficient data center,” said Sridhar Iyengar, vice president, product management at ManageEngine. “Typically, the IT management and facilities infrastructure management are separate worlds, which prevent data center operations teams from readily correlating facilities and IT events. Now, IT360 unifies the facilities and IT management in a unified DCIM console, so data center admins can easily see facilities and IT relationships and manage the complete data center proactively.”

ManageEngine already touts more than 72,000 business customers worldwide, including 60 percent of the Fortune 500. A new entrant into facilities management, it has already established itself in the IT management world. It’s made a name in terms of application discovery and dependency mapping, as well as its advanced CMDB capabilities.

Zoho Pushes Into DCIM

ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation. Zoho is perhaps best known for its suite of SaaS applications that rival Google Apps and Microsoft Office. It also offers CRM, email hosting, project management, accounting and app creation tools. The 1,600 employee company has the workforce to support multiple offerings, and now it finds itself squarely in the DCIM ring with the addition of facilities management to IT360.

Manual processes, multiple tools and consoles, inefficient power management and other challenges interfere with optimal management of the data center and underlying components. For these companies, an automated DCIM solution that supports IT and facilities management from a single console promises to eliminate many of the challenges to data center optimization.

“True data center infrastructure management consolidates the administration of all hardware, software and environmental components across a support stack onto a single console interface,” noted Steve Brasen, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates. “By extending the IT360 solution to deliver functionality that targets key requirements in facilities management, ManageEngine has achieved a milestone in enabling holistic infrastructure monitoring and management that will drive proactive IT optimizations, efficiencies and cost-reductions.”

The new features in IT360 include:

•  Passive device management lets data center operations teams monitor and control passive infrastructure components in the data center, including power, cooling control systems and other non-IT assets. The operations team can also remotely monitor and manage the passive devices as well as manage asset lifecycles. IT360 can also report on power usage effectiveness (PUE), data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) and KPI reports on energy efficiency across sites and regions.
•  Workflow automation relies on more than 70 code-free workflow templates to automate routine tasks that data center admins would otherwise perform manually or write scripts to automate. With IT360, admins can create or modify automated workflows via an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface.
•  Network change and configuration management lets data center admins configure multi-vendor network devices such as routers, switches and firewalls directly from IT360. In addition, IT360 can detect a configuration change in a network device, alert admins to the change and roll back the device to its previous, pre-change state.
• 3-D rack builder enables data center staff to create an exact, three-dimensional replica of their data center infrastructure on screen. Admins can easily build racks and check the health of associated network elements via the drag-and-drop console. Unlike isolated rack builders, the IT360 3-D rack builder displays the real-time status of each element, so admins can visually model the entire data center from the NOC screens.