What is Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)?

Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) encompasses the processes and technologies used to monitor, measure, and manage a data center's physical and virtual infrastructure. DCIM utilizes tools, software, and applications to track a variety of key areas within data centers, such as:

• Physical Infrastructure: This type of monitoring employs methods including sensors, cameras, and facility management software to check the health of equipment and the status of security threats, equipment failures, and other potential anomalies.
• Capacity Management: A reliable and always-available power supply is a crucial requirement in a data center. DCIM software tracks power capacity, network bandwidth, rack space, and cooling capacity. This helps data center operators understand when server racks are running out of space and deploy new equipment when needed. It can also help investigate the causes of high power consumption and improve cooling efficiency.
• Security: DCIM monitors various aspects of data center security, such as:

1. 1. 1. Physical security: This includes preventing unauthorized access and malicious activity, preventing the use of cameras, monitoring door locks and other sensors to detect intrusions and provide alerts.
      2. Environmental safety: Environmental conditions such as dust, humidity, and temperature can be dangerous and threaten the smooth operation of data centers. DCIM systems help reduce the risk of equipment exposure to these hazards. Data center equipment consumes a significant amount of energy, so it's crucial to ensure that airflow in a data center is cooled and monitored to prevent equipment from overheating. Humidity in a data center must be within a specific range to prevent corrosion.
      3. Asset Security: DCIM monitors data center assets such as storage devices, networking equipment, and servers to identify unauthorized activity on critical assets.
      4. Logical security: System logs, network traffic, and other data are monitored by DCIM to alert personnel to suspicious activity, data breaches, and network breaches.

What can a DCIM monitor?

Data center infrastructure management, or DCIM, uses monitoring tools to gather asset data to help improve operational efficiencies across the organization. DCIM can be divided into different levels, including:

1. IT (Information Technology) Equipment:

• Servers: Monitors operational status, temperature, CPU, memory, and storage utilization.
• Storage devices: Controls available space, performance, and data integrity.
• Network Switches: Monitors connectivity, bandwidth, data traffic, and network performance.
• Routers and Firewalls: Manages network connectivity, security settings, and traffic monitoring.

2. Security and Access Control:

• Access Control Systems: Monitors the entry and exit of authorized personnel, records access events and controls access to restricted areas.
• Security Cameras: Monitor security activities and events in real time, record videos and capture images for later analysis.

3. Physical Environment:

• Temperature and Humidity Sensors: Monitors environmental conditions to ensure they are within acceptable limits.
• Water Detection Sensors: Detects leaks or flooding to prevent damage to equipment.
• Smoke and Fire Sensors: Monitors the presence of smoke and triggers alarms in case of fire.

4. Asset Management:

• Equipment Inventory: Maintains a detailed record of all IT assets and data center infrastructure, including location, status, and maintenance history information.

While DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) systems play a crucial role in the efficient management of a data center's physical and logical resources, there is still a need for an innovative and complementary approach that is more detailed at some levels of the infrastructure that takes operational intelligence to a new level, such as:

Electrical Infrastructure:

• PDUs (Power Distribution Units): Monitoring and predicting power distribution problems, load, consumption and power status.
• UPSs (Uninterruptible Power Supply Systems): Monitoring of battery capacity, power status, autonomy time, early identification of anomalies.
• Generators: Controls operational status, fuel level and availability for operation in the event of a power outage, as well as maintenance control based on equipment conditions.

Refrigeration Infrastructure:

• Air conditioning units: Monitors ambient temperature, humidity, air flow, compressor temperature, voltage and current to predict problems early.
• Fans: Controls operational status, rotation speed and air flow.
• Cooling towers: Monitoring and control of pumps, compressors, including inlet and outlet water temperature, voltage, current, humidity, temperature and vibration.

What are the main differences between a DCIM and Bridgemeter:

1. Focus on Anticipation and Prevention: Bridgemeter goes beyond simply monitoring and managing physical infrastructure. Using advanced intelligence algorithms, it anticipates potential failures and anomalies, enabling proactive interventions to prevent outages and maximize operational availability.
2. Additional Intelligence: In addition to monitoring physical parameters such as temperature and humidity, Bridgemeter offers additional intelligence through predictive analytics. It identifies patterns and trends, providing valuable insights to optimize energy efficiency, plan future capacity, and improve data center resource utilization.
3. Interaction with Maintenance Team: Bridgemeter speeds up and reduces the time to correct the problem identified directly with the field team by generating correction tasks with pertinent documentation of the equipment in question.
4. Adaptability: With its ability to adapt to new conditions and environments in real time, Bridgemeter enables rapid response to operational changes. This ensures data center operators can make informed and agile decisions, whether regarding customer service or changes in monitoring intelligence/configuration.
5. Seamless Integration with DCIM: Bridgemeter doesn't replace existing DCIM systems; rather, it enhances them and also excels in connectivity and data integration by supporting over 150 different communication protocols. This means it can connect to any sensor, PLC (Programmable Logic Controller), or existing equipment in the data center, adding DICM connectivity, enabling the collection of denser and more varied information. This capability facilitates rapid system deployment, providing a more intelligent global view of data center operations. Additionally, Bridgemeter acts as middleware for cross-sector connectivity, enabling the seamless integration of data from different systems and equipment across the data center environment.
6. Raising the Bar on Efficiency: By offering a complete and integrated solution for data center management, Bridgemeter raises the bar on operational efficiency and reliability. Its ability to provide real-time insights and support strategic decision-making makes it an essential component of any modern data center environment.

In short, Above-Net 's Bridgemeter not only differentiates itself from traditional DCIM systems but also enhances their effectiveness and usability by adding intelligence and advanced analytics capabilities to data center environments. By adopting Bridgemeter, organizations can achieve a new level of operational excellence and ensure maximum availability of their critical services.

Thermal monitoring as a data center monitoring tool

Thermal monitoring is the process of collecting and analyzing data about the temperature of critical electrical assets in a data center.

Thermal monitoring is used in data centers to monitor the temperature of equipment and electrical infrastructure to prevent overheating and, therefore, equipment failure. This is an important element that contributes to power availability and system uptime.

Increased temperatures, especially at electrical joints and busbars, are a warning sign of potential problems, such as a loose or compromised connection. If left unchecked, there is an increased risk of electrical equipment failure, which can put personnel working around these critical electrical assets at greater risk. Monitoring the temperature of electrical joints and busbars not only helps prevent downtime and damage to critical infrastructure that could otherwise lead to reduced efficiency, corrupted data, or equipment failure, but can also help keep personnel safe around the assets.

Data center operators face numerous challenges, but equipment overheating is one of the most critical. Equipment overheating can lead to unplanned downtime, which has a detrimental effect on service reliability for customers and leads to significant financial and reputational costs. As data reliance increases, there is a greater need for technologies like continuous thermal monitoring to help prevent outages and avoid unplanned downtime.

The adoption of thermal monitoring in data centers is accelerating because it is helping engineering teams minimize equipment damage and reduce the likelihood of outages that can result from undetected failures.

Thermal monitoring methods in data centers

Thermal monitoring can be implemented in data centers in several ways, including:

1. Continuous Thermal Monitoring (CTM): CTM is a condition-based monitoring approach that can replace periodic inspections using thermal imaging (IR) cameras. It is a proactive way to monitor the temperature of electrical infrastructure in data centers and other industries that utilize critical infrastructure. It involves using sensors to continuously measure and monitor the temperature of multiple electrical assets throughout the data center, providing real-time data on the health of the monitored assets. The sensors provide real-time temperature data, alerting personnel to temperature increases before they exceed safe limits. Data from these sensors can then be collected and analyzed to make intelligent decisions and identify potential failures. These sensors can be integrated with smart IoT monitoring systems, providing alarms, notifications, trends, and analytics, aiding predictive maintenance.
2. Thermal imaging cameras: The use of thermal imaging cameras, or IR thermography, is another method of thermal monitoring. These cameras capture images of the heat emitted by electrical equipment. Hot spots and other problems that may not be obvious to the naked eye can be found using thermal cameras. This approach was historically popular, but is rapidly being replaced by more predictive approaches, such as CTM, described above.
3. Audits and Maintenance: This is a preventative maintenance approach that is performed at regular intervals to ensure that refrigeration, HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) systems and other critical infrastructure are operating optimally.

Benefits of thermal monitoring for data centers

• Prevent overheating: Hot spots and overheating are leading causes of data center equipment failure. Strategically placed sensors continuously take temperature readings at various locations, including server racks and busbar distribution systems. The system indicates when temperatures exceed established limits. Thermal monitoring helps prevent data center equipment from overheating.
• Increase equipment longevity: Critical data center equipment, such as server racks, distribution boards, and storage devices, can benefit from extended lifespans when asset temperature and facility humidity are monitored and controlled. Over time, this results in reduced maintenance costs for critical equipment.
• Prevent unexpected power outages: Power outages are often unplanned, and downtime is damaging and costly for data centers. Implementing continuous thermal monitoring of critical assets alerts personnel to potential risks before failure.
• Improve productivity: Early detection of compromised joints and connections in electrical assets reduces power outages. Data centers rely heavily on power availability. Monitoring the temperature of critical electrical connections improves equipment reliability, helping to improve performance and productivity.

Building greater resilience into data centers is crucial for owners and operators to run reliable and sustainable facilities that meet future demands. Maintaining efficiency and electrical safety are essential; therefore, monitoring the temperature of critical assets helps understand where potential failures in critical equipment are likely to occur before an outage. Alerts from temperature monitoring provide information that can be used to schedule predictive maintenance and a more proactive approach for operational personnel.

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