White Paper

3
Introduction
During the rst decade of the 21st century,
the data center emerged as a signicant
corporate asset, playing a vital role in
business management and customer
service. Throughout this period, the
data center underwent an evolution as
computing and data storage capacities
increased signicantly.
Data centers have traditionally been
designed with extra headroom to
accommodate growth, but during the
last decade demand escalated so quickly
that added IT capacity consumed available
headroom and outpaced supply in terms
of oor space and power and cooling
capacity. This created conicts as facility
personnel struggled to supply IT’s demand
for server capacity.
These problems were further exacerbated by
two trends that emerged in the second half
of the decade. The rst is the increased focus
on data center energy consumption. With
both the density and quantity of servers
rising, data center energy consumption
became a signicant factor in terms of IT
cost management and, in some companies,
response to concerns about global warming.
Early efforts to reduce data center energy
consumption focused on reducing costs
around data center cooling, which accounts
for approximately 35 percent of data
center energy consumption. Subsequent
efforts took a more holistic approach that
recognized the interdependency of data
center systems and shifted the focus to the
IT systems that create the need for cooling.
The second trend was the adoption of
virtualization technologies. In its annual
survey of data center managers, the Data
Center Users’ Group saw virtualization
adoption rates of 81 percent in 2009.
This has created a dynamically changing
application environment layered on an
essentially static physical environment,
increasing data center complexity and
introducing new challenges to physical
infrastructure management.
In most organizations, data center managers
lacked the tools to effectively address these
challenges. The network management
systems essential to IT personnel in
monitoring and managing IT equipment
did not address the critical issues of energy
consumption, available rack capacity or
ambient air temperatures that are essential
to proactive data center management.
Further, the building management systems
used by facility personnel to monitor power
and cooling in the data center failed to
provide the alarm management capabilities
required for critical systems and to account
for the interdependencies between systems.
Evolving from a reactive to a proactive
approach to infrastructure monitoring
requires a new type of management
system that provides visibility into the
data center physical infrastructure within
both the IT and facility domains and across
these two domains.