Emerson Launches Trellis DCIM Tool

Emerson Network Power today announced plans to combine the company's existing Aperture, Avocent and Liebert DCIM solutions into a data center infrastructure platform called Trellis, which will be designed to combine hardware, software and services to provide data center managers detailed information on their infrastructure capacity.

The company announced its Trellis roadmap today at Interop in New York. Emerson expects the core Trellis modules to be available by the fourth quarter of 2011 with subsequent modules rolling out over the following 12 to 18 months. Existing solutions from Emerson will either migrate or integrate with the new Trellis platform.

Trellis will provide a real-time view of operating conditions for IT equipment and the power and cooling systems, allowing companies to make better use of their available data center capacity. According to Emerson, if every U.S. data center improve utilization by 10 percent, U.S. businesses would save more than $10 billion through improved data center infrastructure management.

"Virtualization has brought greater flexibility and efficiency to data center management, but has introduced new complexities and pressures to the static physical infrastructure," said Steve Hassell, president of the Avocent business of Emerson Network Power. Hassell was CIO at Emerson when the company built its new 35,000 square-foot, LEED Gold data center, an initiative that gave him first-hand experience with the challenges facing even a state-of-the-art data center. “Organizations today lack visibility into the impact of virtualization and the deployment of high-density servers on the physical infrastructure, and that keeps them from utilizing the full capacity of their equipment. We intend to provide that visibility along with the tools to manage and optimize changes to the physical infrastructure.”

Emerson says Trellis will provide a detailed view of physical and IT infrastructure layers, eliminating the need for guesswork that necessitates a power system capacity "buffer" based on nameplate loads for equipment. In emphasizing the importance of DCIM tools in its plans, Emerson noted that its acquisitions of Aperture and Avocent represent a more than $1.25 billion investment, which is among the largest in a single solution category in the company’s history. In January, Emerson named its own CIO, Steve Hassell, to head up the newly formed division that encompasses the Aperture and Avocent brands.

"By 2014, DCIM tools and processes will become main stream in data centers, growing from 1 percent penetration (in 2010) to 60 percent," said David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for Gartner’s Infrastructure teams. "To take advantage of the benefits as they evolve, I&O leaders should begin the DCIM evaluation process in 2010 and 2011,"