Networks Europe Jan-Feb 2017 | Page 46

46 DCIM

46 DCIM

" No longer is management merely concerned with the efficient operation of assets such as servers , power supplies , cooling and cabling . It must now be able to make decisions quickly on how and where IT services should be deployed "
This introduces a challenge for the effective management of so many disparate assets . Although Data Centre Infrastructure Management ( DCIM ) tools have been available for some time , they were originally developed to manage physical assets typically residing in one centralised location ; they were not designed to handle phenomena like cloud computing .
New challenges Managing a hybrid data centre infrastructure introduces new challenges for IT management . Not only must they maintain tight control and monitoring of their own physical assets , they must also be able to integrate with multiple management tools for private and public cloud . Data centres are increasingly abstracting from physical layer and truly becoming software-defined .
This is reflected in the observations of industry watcher IDC which projects that in the period between 2015 and 2020 , services related to DCIM deployment and integration with other management platforms will continue to be in high demand and will grow at a compound annual rate of 10.1 %. Its forecast is that by 2020 , the worldwide market for DCIM software and services will be over a billion dollars , of which software will account for $ 690m and integration services for $ 388.1m . This compares with revenues of $ 318.3m for software and $ 240.2m for services in 2015 .
The emergence of hybrid infrastructure – the combination of in-house or edge computing assets with cloud services poses new management challenges . No longer is management merely concerned with the efficient operation of assets such as servers , power supplies , cooling and cabling . It must now be able to make decisions quickly on how and where IT services should be deployed . Does it host more server and storage capacity in-house , or does it
www . networkseuropemagazine . com