Sunbird Aims to Make DCIM Software Useful for CIOs and CEOs

Sunbird Software, the DCIM software company Raritan spun off before it was acquired by Legrand, has launched the latest release of its data center management software suite, adding an easy-to-understand dashboard for C-level execs and a host of new and enhanced monitoring, auditing, and analytics capabilities.

Enterprise CIOs and CEOs are increasingly interested in what’s going on with their companies’ data center infrastructure, since data centers and IT departments that oversee them are now seen more and more as strategic assets that can add business value as opposed to being in their traditional role as costly infrastructure needed to support various internal operations and business functions.

“Sunbird DCIM enables data center resources to be used more efficiently and to be shifted to meet new and changing business demands,” Sunbird President Herman Chan said in a statement.

Since DCIM software tools track a wide variety of data center parameters, they have the information those executives need, so answering to the demand is simply a matter of translating the often complex data sets the tools collect into easy-to-understand visualizations. This is what Sunbird’s new Enterprise Dashboard aims to do:

It presents a company’s data center infrastructure as a series of tiles. Each tile represents a data center site and displays some basic data about it, such as its current load, total power capacity, and available power capacity, as well as unusual events.

A CIO can use the configurable dashboard simply to track infrastructure health and capacity from a bird’s-eye perspective, while an operations manager can drill deeper down into each site by clicking a tile and seeing data on individual cabinets, individual servers, and the status of their ports, power connections, and energy usage.

Here is a list of other updates in the latest Sunbird DCIM software:

• A new user interface to DCIM’s Paperless Audit Mobile App makes it easier to conduct audits using iOS and Android mobile phones and tablets. Coupled with a Bluetooth handheld scanner, the audit app’s new bar code search and input capabilities make it easier to track equipment and to make updates on the go. From the data center floor, the app also can be used to initiate requests to install, move, and decommission a device. It can be used to view and complete work orders, as well as verify that an installation was done according to plan.
• Predictive Analytics — Modeling/Simulation Capabilities
• New Live Charts were added to make it easier to identify stranded power capacity in data centers, helping to avoid the expense of deploying new cabinets. Side-by-side views of redundant cabinet PDUs provide valuable information on potential power supply failures. Additional views allow for trend analysis of circuit breaker limits and real-time loads to predict potential failures.
• Health Map provides a bird’s-eye view of entire white space and visual alerts of abnormal operation conditions that might lead to data center downtime. An inspector with Real-time Readings and alarm details enables drill down capabilities to investigate the root cause and possible remediation.
• New Specialized Polling Engine optimized for early health alerts. The new alert engine augments the existing data polling engine that is focused on highly accurate data collection at a one-second frequency.
• Enhanced support for LDAP and Active Directory
• Enhanced Import and Export makes it easier to add large amounts of data and quickly and resolves data quality issues with automatic validation.