By the Numbers: Estimate Your Data Center’s DCIM ROI

K.G. Anand is director, Global Solutions and Product Marketing, Avocent Products and Services, Emerson Network Power. He leads these efforts globally for the company’s data center hardware, software and services offerings.

Anand-tn

The term data center infrastructure management (DCIM) has been a buzzword in the data center industry for a couple of years, but a lack of information regarding the barriers to DCIM adoption and implementation among organizations has made many hesitant to purchase and deploy a DCIM solution. One of the primary reasons is the inability of IT and facilities management to prove the value of the tool to their executive management. Go to any trade show and you will see a number of DCIM products and a like number of claims promising efficiency and manageability. But how do you know if the solution will improve your bottom line and meet your needs?

What’s needed is a tool to help develop specific estimates for justifying an investment in DCIM. Emerson Network Power has created such a tool, but these calculators have no significance unless we can agree on what to value in a DCIM solution.

To that end, Forrester Consulting came up with a calculation: The Total Economic Impact (TEI). The framework helps identify the fundamental elements of TEI, including costs, benefits to the entire organization, flexibility and risk factors that affect the investment decision. It’s also numbers-driven and highly specific to each user’s environment since the tool measures benefits by specific DCIM categories, enabling data center managers to understand where they receive the most value. This framework is a bottom-line approach to something that’s been honored more in theory than in practice. The factors include:

The ROI analysis has already been tested and proven successful. Forrester determined that by using Emerson’s ROI tool and implementing a DCIM solution, a major global bank with 160 racks across three data centers would be able to realize more than $1.6 million dollars in specific benefits over a three-year period.

The bank cited the following benefits in determining their positive DCIM ROI:

In addition to the above five benefits, the bank attributed a delay in constructing a new data center to their DCIM solution and its better management of its existing data centers.

A Wholistic View is Needed

At the center of today’s business, the data center is under intense pressure to deliver 24/7. Dissimilar internal teams, management tools and performance metrics are all adding to this operational challenge. Without a holistic view of power consumption, asset utilization and service levels, data center managers and their departments are struggling to deliver the availability, capacity and efficiency that their businesses demand.

DCIM solutions enable organizations to provide a more interconnected and practical approach to managing their data centers. Now that data center managers have the ability to measure the value of their chosen DCIM tool, they can more effectively safeguard availability, capitalize on resource utilization and achieve improved sustainability. With data center performance increasingly related to business success, these significant enhancements will all help to deliver competitive advantages, while ensuring a positive return on a long-term DCIM investment.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.