Overview: Data Center Infrastructure Management

From established solutions to new entries, the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) market is moving fast, as data center managers demand greater insight into the complex environments they manage.  Last year Gartner predicted a 60 percent market penetration of DCIM by 2014, driven by increased power and heat density, data center consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing.

Definition and Incumbents

Popular enough to have its own Wikipedia page, DCIM is defined by Gartner as 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. Achieved through the implementation of specialized software, hardware and sensors, DCIM will enable a common, real-time monitoring and management platform for all interdependent systems across IT and facility infrastructures.

Several of the active players in the DCIM market have been in the news recently. nlyte Software last month launched version 6 of its DCIM tool (see our video demo).  Last week Raritan announced that it had received private equity investment from New Spring Capital, which will help the company develop and market its dcTrack DCIM offering (see our video demo).  Another major player is Avocent, a unit of Emerson Network Power. Avocent recently introduced Trellis, a DCIM platform integrating hadrware, software and services.

Here are some announcements this week from the DCIM frontier:

Aperture helps Fujitsu

Emerson Network Power (EMR) announced that Fujitsu has significantly improved its data center reliability and efficiency by using Emerson's Aperture software solutions. Fujitsu is using Aperture Capacity Manager, Aperture Configuration Manager, and Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager. These solutions allow Fujitsu to anticipate customers' expansion needs with simplified and streamlined capacity planning. "Customers typically come to us because they want efficient, flexible, and economical data center services that provide the security and resilience they need," said Chris Flanagan, data center operations development manager, Fujitsu in the U.K. and Ireland. "And Emerson Network Power has been able to help us deliver on that need."

MODIUS and Starline

MODIUS announced the first release of a joint integration between its monitoring solution and Starline, a producer of customizable power distribution products.  The turnkey solution will give data center managers the granular power monitoring they need to optimize their power systems and report detailed usage statistics.  “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers to integrate our new Critical Power Monitor (CPM) in their data centers,” said Mark Swift, Business Development Manager for STARLINE. “MODIUS offers us a proven data collection and management system that is available and already working - giving our end users a complete package for comprehensive power monitoring.”

Viridity

With a focus on energy-optimized data centers Massachusetts based Viridity was recently selected as a finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 Global Award, honoring 2010's most promising private technology ventures from around the world. Their Energy Center product is aimed at improving DCIM productivity and efficiency through discovery, organization, monitoring and analytics.  On Thursday, January 27th CTO and Co-Founder Mike Rowan will demonstrate the company's recently announced EnergyCheck software. EnergyCheck enables users to understand overall energy efficiency and discover opportunities for recapturing power, cooling and space capacity.

No Limits Software RaMP

Newcomer No Limits Software recently launched its corporate website and will soon announce events surrounding the release of its Rack Management Platform (RaMP).  RaMP is intended for use as a stand-alone product or to enhance existing DCIM solutions. It is an end-to-end hardware and software solution for comprehensive real-time monitoring and inventory analysis combining exact location with system configuration and power and environmental properties.