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- Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is an emerging (2012) form of data center management which extends the more traditional systems and network management approaches to now include the physical and asset-level components. DCIM leverages the integration of information technology (IT) and facility management disciplines to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning of a data center's critical systems. Essentially it provides a significantly more comprehensive view of ALL of the resources within the data center. The deployment of a successful DCIM solution is achieved through the implementation of specialized software, hardware and sensors. The promise of DCIM is to enable a common, real-time monitoring and management platform for all interdependent systems across IT and facility infrastructures. Over the longer term, a great deal of intelligence will be added upon this structure as well as highly specialized automation capabilities to create a dynamic infrastructure that can actually self-adjust or tune itself to more closely match data center resource supply with workload demand. With over 100 vendors now claiming that they offer components that fit within the DCIM landscape, the rapid evolution of the DCIM category is leading to the creation of many associated data center performance management and measurement capabilities, including DCeP - Data Center Energy Productivity and DCPM - Data Center Predictive Modeling with the intention of providing increasingly cost-effective operations support for certain aspects of the data center. Since its identification as a missing component for optimized data center management, the broad DCIM category has been flooded with a wide range of point-solutions and hardware-vendor offerings intended to address this void. The analyst firm Gartner Research has started using a set of terms to try and segment this population of DCIM vendors. DCIM Suite vendors number around a dozen in 2012, and consist of software offering which are comprehensive and integrated in nature. These suites deal with lifecycle asset management, and touch upon IT and Facilities. A second term, DCIM Specialists is used to describe the rest of the DCIM vendors. In general, these specialists can be viewed as enhancements to the DCIM Suite offerings. (The term DCIM Ready is also used by some to describe this same group of vendors providing enhancement solutions) The large framework providers are re-tooling their own wares and creating DCIM alliances and partnerships with various other DCIM vendors to complete their own management picture. The inefficiencies seen previously by having limited visibility and control at the physical layer of the data center is simply too costly for end-users and vendors alike in the energy-conscious world we live in. These large framework providers include Hewlett-Packard, BMC, CA and IBM/Tivoli and have promised DCIM will be part of their overall management structure and are scrambling to do so through these in-house and partnership efforts. While the physical layer of the data center has historically been viewed as a hardware exercise, there are a number of DCIM Suite and DCIM Specialist SOFTWARE vendors such as (alphabetically) Altima, APC by Schneider Electric, Cormant, Emerson, FieldView, Nlyte, Rackwise, RFcode and Sentilla who boast varied DCIM capabilities including one or more of the following; Capacity Planning, high-fidelity visualization, Real-Time Monitoring, Environmental/Energy sensors, business analytics, Process/Change Management and integration well with various types of external management systems and data sources. Clearly, data center management domains are converging across the logical and physical layers. This type of converged management environment will allow enterprises to use fewer resources, eliminate stranded capacity, and manage the coordinated operations of these otherwise independent components.
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