Canon’s DCIM Needs Centered Around Integrating With Existing Systems

BY: Jason Verge

Canon’s single biggest concern in its search for a DCIM vendor was the ability for it to integrate with existing systems. The company wanted a vendor that not only worked with other systems in place, but one that could act as the foundation for things to come.

Canon has data centers across Virginia and New York consisting of 3,000 physical servers. When the company decided to open a second New York data center, it wanted to start right. That meant first off, it needed to change the way it was doing things.

Canon was using spreadsheets to track physical infrastructure managed across two teams. Within the two data centers, there were several other teams all using individual spreadsheets to track their concerns.

The fact that the infrastructure behind these teams was interrelated caused problems, and the spreadsheet method meant that not each had the same or accurate information. As a result, the Infrastructure management team wanted to bring in more formalized tools.

DCIM is a broad term, although it’s incorrectly being pigeonholed as a tool for power and cooling management. Because of obfuscation with the term DCIM, many assess whether they need DCIM from solely a power and cooling management perspective. This was not Cannon’s approach.

In Cannon’s case, its primary needs surrounded integrating with ITSM and other systems in order to gain insight into what was going on with the servers, rather than just the wider facility environment. The key to its successful deployment was knowing immediate needs and growing from there.

Nlyte’s Vice President of Marketing Mark Harris suggests removing “DCIM” from our vocabulary and talking about needs instead. In Cannon’s case, the big need was integrating with existing systems. This tipped the scales in favor of Nlyte.

“DCIM has significant value at the power and cooling level, but I think it has larger fiscal value at the IT side of it – what’s in the rack, why it’s there, and who owns it,” said Harris. “It’s about more than keeping things running; it’s about keeping things running at the right cost.”

Canon needed to tie DCIM into ITSM systems, service management, and ticketing, and tying it all into general ledgers. Integration capabilities are not a “yes/no” checkbox when selecting a DCIM vendor; the answer is always yes, said Harris.

“A selling point of Nlyte was the off-the-shelf integrations with some products that we already had, and with some that we didn’t currently have. But we are beginning to realize what we need as a large enterprise organization,” said Sean Hendershot

manager for Canon’s U.S.A. data center ops and IT infrastructure division. “What Nlyte has done is provided us with the push of ‘we need to stop doing it the old way and start doing it a better way.’”

Nlyte has created several out-of-the-box connectors, which means it will not only integrate with existing systems but will continue to do so easily.

The alternative is getting a programmer in every once in a while to sit down and make a connection, which creates ongoing expenses and headaches. Canon’s other systems frequently update and Nlyte updates as well. Using thousands of lines of code written once is a risky, horrible way of doing things.

DCIM should be viewed as a long-term, big enterprise class system, which will be in place for dozens of years. An enterprise’s other systems will change during that time, so it’s not about if it integrates now, but if it will continue to integrate as the makeup of an enterprise’s systems change.

”The main value of DCIM is discipline,” said Harris. “Yes, it’s a bunch of tools, but the big value is it gives you a purpose built platform to design and build processes, and to perform processes by design rather than reaction.”

An unforeseen effect of Canon using DCIM wasthat it ended up choosing not to use a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) in conjunction with Nlyte. Nlyte’s strength is in managing the lifecycle of assets. Its strength meant Cannon was able to use Nlyte as the single source of information.

The Infrastructure Management team provisioned and briefly trained application users directly on the Nlyte system. These business users can now self-serve where their hardware or virtual machines are running. Beyond the core team of six daily users, there are now more than 250 of these application owners that access Nlyte on an as-needed basis.

 

Nlyte Suite 7 DCIM Solutions

Formerly called Global DataCenter Management, Nlyte is a leading provider of DCIM solutions. Founded in 2003, the company has quickly transformed itself into a key player in the DCIM segment. Nlyte 7 Suite is a purpose-driven DCIM solution from Nlyte that is scalable, fully extensible and customizable. The industry patent asset allocation, along with contextual content repository, is the strength of the Nlyte 7 Suite. Here is a comprehensive evaluation of the Nlyte 7 Suite:

Summary

Nlyte is a major player in the DCIM segment. The current version of Nlyte 7 provides greater efficiency for asset management and change management. It seamlessly integrates with popular enterprise management solutions like the BMC’s Change Management, VMware, HP, RF Code, Server Tech and CMDB. In a short span of time, Nlyte has transformed the DCIM suite into a business life cycle management solution.

Asset Management (10/10)

The Nlyte DataCenter allows you to holistically manage your entire infrastructure. Nlyte uses a central repositoryof assets with key attributes while maintaining contextual relationships between assets and asset parameters.Working in conjunction with the Nlyte Materials Catalog, it records asset attributes like size, weight, power and connections, and automatically updates the database. It effectively manages physical, logical and virtual assets along with the asset location. Assets can be grouped by cage, pod, logical or user-defined categories. It offers automatic asset discovery and reconciliation.

Power Management (9.0/10)

The Nlyte Connection Manager enables you to graphically view power connections within the infrastructure at any level. You can check the entire power path, including connection points and connect information, right from the supplier’s sub-station feed to the data center through UPS, PDUs, generators and power strips at any level. You can assess the asset properties, connection type, connection details, destination details and source port information. The graphical view can be filtered based on fiber, power or network. The circuit endpoint allows for the viewing of asset connectivity. This connectivity data can be exported into Excel spreadsheets.

Thermal Management (9.0/10)

The Nlyte DataCenter enables you to map the entire power path of the power from the supplier’s sub-station to the datacenter and to each connected device. The suite monitors the power consumption of every device including air conditioners and IT and non-IT equipment. It provides clear visibility into power usage effectiveness (PUE) values by calculating the IT equipment power (ITEP) and the total facility power (TFP). Based on these values, automatic provisioning of power devices can be achieved.

Space Management (9.0/10)

The Nlyte Floor Planner provides a CAD-style graphical user interface to visualize the physical layout of the racks, rooms and floors in the data center. You can easily track the asset chain and make changes accordingly. Power provision, airflow, heat control and use of space can be effectively managed using this application. Color-coded designations are given to different performance thresholds that apply to each device. A layered representation of the entire asset infrastructure can be viewed. At the same time, categorized views of cabinets, racks, cage representations, floor standing servers and power infrastructure can be observed.

Visual Modeling (8.0/10)

Nlyte Dashboard & Reporting provides a number of pre-defined and user-defined dashboards to visualize critical operational metrics. It offers visual representation of assets in the form of charts and graphs. The built-in analytics engine enables you to create real-time analytics of heat and power metrics in addition to a detailed view of asset inventory. With Nlyte visual modeling, spreadsheets or Visio diagrams are not necessary.

Hypothetical Modeling (9.0/10)

Nlyte Predict enables you to envisage the future state of your data center’s power, cooling, space and networking capabilities based on real-time analytics and historical usage metrics. Using these “what-if” models, you can assess the effect of any change made to the infrastructure before actually making the change. While installing new assets, you can determine if there is enough space, power and networking options. You can investigate the benefits of upgrading your servers, and you can create forecasted projects and envisage actual costs.

Access & Control (9.0/10)

The Nlyte Integrator is a NgaugeAPI-based connector that enables you to integrate DCIM solutions with a number of third party applications or existing systems like VMware, HP, RF Code, Server Tech and CMDB.It is based on Intel’s Datacenter Management technology. Being a purpose-built web service, Nlyte Integrator makes it easy to integrate it with existing systems or third party solutions.

Reporting & Alarming (8.0/10)

The Nlyte Dashboard & Reporting feature allows you to quickly generate a wide variety of reports to obtain critical operational metrics. It comes with a built-in reporting and analytics engine. You can use templates or customize your reports for the IT, finance and executive departments. Reports can be automatically generated and delivered. Report delivery is quick and consistent.