CA DCIM

Headquartered in New York, CA Technologies has been in the DCIM market for some time. Prior to coining the term DCIM, CA’s management model was referred to as Operational Energy Management and Data Center Infrastructure and Energy Management. CA’s early offerings in the Operational Energy Management market included the energy monitoring solution CA ecoMeter, which was introduced in 2009.

The team that developed the first version of CA’s DCIM solution based on CA ecoMeter included, Dhesi Ananchaperumal, SVP & business unit executive and distinguished engineer at CA Technologies; Peter Gilbert, VP of business strategy, and Terrence Clark, SVP and general manager at CA Technologies. All of this technology was built in-house and not through an acquisition.

In developing its technology, CA now has a very direct offering to the data center ecosystem.

“The unique value proposition of CA DCIM is founded on our software development and IT expertise, vision of true facilities and IT convergence for Infrastructure and Operations (I&O), worldwide presence, and customer satisfaction,” said Francois Cattoen, product manager for CA DCIM, CA Technologies. “The CA DCIM solution is hardware agnostic and has a data collection and integration approach for the physical infrastructure that makes for easy deployment and integration with third party solutions. Our highly scalable architecture, breadth of use cases, superior user experience, and integration approach differentiates CA DCIM.”

CA DCIM is deployed within very demanding data center environments throughout the world. These data center environments require high availability, high security, and hyperscale capabilities. Some of these demanding environments include RagingWire, Datotel, and Facebook. BBVA, Logicalis Group, Entel and Sicredi are other examples of customers using CA DCIM.

“CA DCIM enables organizations to prevent downtime with continuous monitoring, intelligent alerting and visibility into the data center and IT infrastructure,” added Cattoen. “It can be deployed rapidly, easily and efficiently so IT/facilities can quickly respond to business needs. And for service providers, CA DCIM helps optimize infrastructure to more efficiently support tenants and can help service providers differentiate and increase revenue with new services.”

CA DCIM Solution Details

CA Technologies is one of the leading providers of software solutions to businesses of all sizes. Founded in 1976, the company has quickly transformed itself into a valued leader in the IT industry. CA DCIM is a combination of two products: CA ecoMeter and CA Visual Infrastructure. Here is a comprehensive evaluation of CA DCIM solutions.

Asset Management

CA DCIM solutions provide an auto discovery feature that automatically discovers assets present in the data center. It uses a wide range of protocols, including SNMP, Modbus and BACnet, to collect data from a wide range of devices. The asset information is stored in a centralized database. Data can be manually added too. This data is visualized in a 3D format to help you better understand the location and details of every asset.

Power Management

CA Visual Infrastructure is a 3D application designed to provide real-time monitoring of space, cooling and power within the data center and IT facilities. It tracks the entire power path from the sub-station feed to the equipment in the data center. It measures and analyzes power load and consumption across data centers, buildings, systems and multiple devices. You can easily determine areas of low and high power consumption, underperforming and efficient assets, consumption patterns and waste. It uses intelligent alerting to identify power issues and reduces false alarms.

Thermal Management

For an efficient thermal management, CA DCIM offers CA ecoMeter, a product that captures real-time data of energy use across the data center. It reads data from environmental sensors and records it in the database to provide it in a 3D format for a better analysis of the resource usage. It reads data from multiple sources and consolidates it. CA ecoMeter creates standard and custom metrics for power usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE) values to gauge the performance of data center facilities. Based on these metrics, you can take appropriate actions to optimize energy efficiency in the data center.

Space Management

The data collected by real-time monitoring of CA Visual Infrastructure allows you to efficiently manage the space within the data center. It provides a detailed analysis in a 3D visualization format to better understand the entire infrastructure in a top-down view. You can determine the capacity in use and the capacity available. You can decide where to install new racks where excess cooling and power is available. The addition or relocation of assets can be done pretty quickly.

Visual Modeling

3D visual modeling is one of the striking features of CA DCIM software. To better meet business objectives, CA DCIM enables you to visualize your data center’s environment in 3D and efficiently manage power, cooling and space capacity in the data center. Using this 3D visualization tool, you can gain insights into the building layout, inventory locations, resource capacity, analyze resource usage trends and control the asset management. The interface is easy to use.

Hypothetical Modeling

Taking advantage of CA ecoMeter and CA Visual Infrastructure, CA DCIM software provides a good platform to effectively manage capacity and power in a data center. This data is offered in a 3D visualization model to better understand how each asset is placed within the datacenter. In addition, CA DCIM software offers future capacity planning with “what-if” scenarios. Before actually making a change to the infrastructure, you can determine the effect a device will have on the power and space of the data center without disrupting any service or load.

Access & Control

CA DCIM software uses standard protocols like SNMP, Modbus and BACnet to tracks assets within the data center. Integrating this application with other third party solutions like VMware, HP and RF Code is quick and easy. CA Visual Infrastructure augmented with Foundation Services provides mobile device dashboards to enable users to quickly access the software from any device, anytime and anywhere.

Reporting & Alarming

CA DCIM software provides a highly intuitive 3D interface to create a wide array of reports. You can create live reports, trend reports and charge-back reports. Report templates can be customized to suit customer-specific needs. The CA DCIM application uses a building management system (BMS) or an energy monitoring system (EMS) to generate alerts or control functionalities for IT infrastructure and facilities devices