DCIM Solution to Control Data Center Sprawl

- Maurice Donegan, director of product management for Emerson Network Power’s Avocent business (www.emersonnetworkpower.com), says:

Virtual sprawl results when different applications are added to handle various business processes, causing the automated solutions –put in place to manage demand in virtual environments – to populate virtual instances in an undisciplined way. Consequences include unbalanced power consumption and resource utilization.  

Emerson Network Power has introduced version 650 of its Aperture™ Suite with advanced software for data center planning, management and performance optimization. Key features respond to customer needs to manage and track virtual sprawl impact on the data center, gain dashboard analysis view on data center efficiency and manage integrated monitoring on data center devices.

While earlier versions of the Aperture Suite helped managers better understand the amount of resource consumption and where it occurs across the data center floor, the new version takes the next step of giving them insight into what is driving that consumption. By integrating with popular virtual management systems (VMware and Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager), now virtual processes can be mapped to their physical hosts to prevent infrastructure overloading and to identify underutilized resources. Armed with this knowledge, the data center manager can advise staff where to shift resources across the data center to more safely provide the infrastructure support they require.

In addition to helping control virtual sprawl, the Aperture Suite now offers high-level dashboards that deliver more actionable data center performance metrics. With the new dashboards, data center personnel can quickly see if efficiency numbers are being met, whether assets are performing correctly, which assets might be aging out and more – and can easily report this information to management.

In short, the latest Aperture Suite release enables data center managers to see more discreetly across the data center, evaluate all options and optimize resources to safely and efficiently to support demand. It also provides a wealth of performance data in a form that can readily be used to support management decisions.