Schneider Electric releases DCIM white paper

Schneider Electric has released White Paper 281, "How Modern DCIM Addresses CIO Management Challenges within Distributed, Hybrid IT Environments” and a supporting TradeOff Tool, both available for immediate use.

The new White Paper focuses on Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software and takes a close look at the rapidly-changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) as IT has taken centre stage in the past few years. The document demonstrates how the success of a CIO is ultimately rooted in a solid foundation of maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable IT operations. In an environment of highly distributed hybrid IT, this goal becomes harder to accomplish.

“Business requirements are forcing CIOs to hybridize their data centre and IT portfolio architecture by placing IT capacity in colocation facilities and building out capacity at the local edge – sometimes in a big way,” said author Patrick Donovan, Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center. “CIOs have always been tasked with managing and maintaining resilient and secure operations, but generally have been focused on core data centre sites. Now, on top of having many more distributed sites needing resiliency and security, they are also being asked to report on the sustainability of their IT operations. This marks a real sea change in terms of their responsibilities.”

The need for resiliency, security, and sustainability

In the 16-page paper, Donovan describes the evolution of enterprise IT portfolios and explores the resulting management challenges. He explains how modern DCIM software has evolved and is more optimized for increasingly distributed environments. Distributed IT makes security a top concern along with the need for improved resiliency and tracking and reporting of the IT operation’s environmental impact.

An opportunity to “trade off” various DCIM scenarios with new calculator

A new Schneider Electric TradeOff Tool, the DCIM Monitoring Value Calculator for Distributed IT, supports the White Paper and provides user-selectable inputs and adjustable assumptions to perform “what-if” scenarios to see the ROI/payback of monitoring software. It considers factors like downtime, staffing, security and environmental incidents, and cashflow.

“We wanted to create a useful framework to help customers quantify the potential value of DCIM in their operations and we are excited for them to try our tool,” said TradeOff Tool creator Wendy Torell, Senior

Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center. “We designed it to be user friendly and it easily adapts to the customer’s specific environment and level of maturity.”