“There’s a demand for a new chapter in Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)” Assaf Skolnik

Only two weeks ago, we held our thought leadership roundtable event with leading professionals and operators of the data center industry. Whilst we are waiting for the output of this event and its associated white papers, I thought I would put pen to paper on my own thoughts and vision for an industry desperate to create and exploit useable data.

For a sector at the spearhead of an evolutionary charge that is already realising once fantastical dreams of digital twins, augmented reality and ubiquitous computing, the data center industry is unexpectedly conservative when it comes to its own embrace of technology.

Indeed, at a time when microprocessor chips are considered the world’s most valuable commodity and these words could conceivably have been written by a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence, it finds itself at real risk of falling behind the automation curve. 

This lag to exploit the technological processes it powers is all the harder to comprehend given the data center market’s acknowledgment of an appetite, and very real need, to optimise its operations.

At RiT Tech, we know there’s a demand for a new chapter in Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) because our team has spent the past three years listening intently and learning from those in the business.

Despite being pioneers in the field of automation, having developed Automated Infrastructure Management [AIM] – a technology now integrated into ISO/IEC 18598 – during the 1990s, it has been a welcome education and one we actively sought.

We chose a path of rigorous research because nobody should assume to know all the answers and, while we believed that XpedITe, Universal Intelligent Infrastructure Management (UIIM) tool, had the potential to change the data center industry for the better, it was important to ground this aspiration in reality.

Innovation should not be about pursuing your own dream but realising those of your customers and therefore studying the functionalities desired by end users has been crucial in maturing RiT Tech’s expertise. 

And having absorbed the lessons on offer, our vision of UIIM is ready to graduate and we are confident that XpedITe will educate by example. 

Schooled by those it seeks to serve, it is already redressing the market’s reticence to automation – a reluctance to procedural and operational change fuelled by operators being burned previously by a succession of expensive but ineffective DCIM solutions. 

XpedITe’s thirst for knowledge is key. The programme wants a universal understanding of its surroundings so that it can present a real-time, 360-degree picture of operations and universally support every department associated with a facility – from operators and engineers to security and client services. The perfect student, it can be configured to harvest and exploit information from all layers and software systems in a data center, and it is from this single source of truth the UIIM can deliver its eponymous ‘intelligence’ and ‘management’.

Far more than just a monitoring system, XpedITe collates, analyses and shares data that can be relied on and acted upon – whether manually or autonomously – to orchestrate and optimise services and resources to deliver both profitable and sustainable operations.

UIIM truly excels when it is embedded in a company’s culture and is integrated with workflows and organisational processes, procedures and policies, and can showcase its aptitude for autonomous provisioning. 

It has been asked some tough exam questions by some very mature customers to date but routinely achieves high grades; impressing with its ability to plan installations from initial order and warehousing to cabinet configurations and the production of detailed work orders, while considering factors such as physical location, customer requests, logistics and capacity – be it of power, space, services or connectivity. 

Already a proverbial jack of all trades, master of many, UIIM’s ability to top the class is currently only constrained by the imagination of an industry reluctant to broaden its technological horizons due to a disdain for DCIM.

And while RiT Tech is ready to help remove such mental blocks, we don’t intend to call time on our own education. Our implementation teams will continue to develop best practice as they work in tandem with our clients and our research and development department will maintain its efforts to refine XpedITe and seek out market-leading technology partners.

In brief, we’re keeping an open mind and hope all those who doubt how transformative UIIM can be do the same.