Schneider, HP Link Application and Power Management in DCIM Integration

Schneider Electric and HP have integrated Schneider's data center infrastructure management software StruxureWare with HP’s OneView infrastructure management platform. The combination will provide data center managers with further insight into servers, storage, and networking.

Bridging the silos between facility and data center managers continues to be a top concern in the DCIM space. The two companies announced in January that they were working on a converged data center and IT management platform. The OneView integration builds upon an earlier integration of StruxureWare with HP’s Universal Configuration Management Database (uCMB).

StruxureWare provides the ability to monitor, operate, analyze, and optimize data center power, cooling, security, and energy, and OneView give it the IT monitoring and management element.

"It's a good move for Schneider, as DCIM is moving up the IT stack," said Rhonda Ascierto, research manager at 451 Research. "The big drivers are greater visibility into the cost for workloads and applications. Data Service Optimization integration up the stack is important. As more IT services are being outsourced, people need to understand the true cost of running a service."

Ascierto said that giving application data views of physical infrastructure is an early, big trend in the space, and that this partnership speaks to that trend. DCIM tracks the physical resources of the data center. When you integrate it with services you can track virtual resources. It's about associating applications and services with the underlying elements.

The integration means the ability to share info and data across platforms easily to give a more complete view of facilities and IT. It shows application dependencies on physical infrastructure and helps determine true cost of ownership by associating workloads with watts, bridging two often very separate worlds of IT operations and the facility.

“IT and facilities partnerships are the core of converged management,” said Rick Einhorn, HP vice president of data center consulting, in a release. “It’s an important element for businesses looking to benefit from the new style of IT across the data center and facilities lifecycle.”

HP has also joined Schneider’s EcoStruxure Technology Partner Program. The program is about providing collaborative solutions that provide better interoperability and reduce integration costs for easier deployment.

There are a number of other DCIM providers that integrate with OneView, including Panduit, iTracs and Nlyte.

Schneider has been boosting Struxureware through partnerships and adding functionality. The company added some colo friendly features to the DCIM this year and made it available on Microsoft Azure, bringing energy management tools to the cloud world.

Major data center vendors known for power chain offerings are looking to software in general to better tie facilities and IT. Eaton recently noted it was looking to software to unify IT and facilities management. Emerson has also been doing the same with its Trellis DCIM.

Power management is an integral part of the infrastructure management picture, but is often an island. Schneider and HP integration work speaks to the facilities and IT worlds moving closer together, as the building and what's on the servers directly affect one another.