subject: Dcim Software Solution For Financial Services [print this page] The Financial Services Industry (FSI) cannot afford any disruption in the running of its applications or IT infrastructure as it supports a globally interconnected round-the clock operation. The tenet is simple: no single failure should impact continuous availability of any mission critical application.
CIOs in Financial Services Industry (FSI) are challenged to provide applications and IT infrastructure to meet the industrys key requirements of:
-Risk management
-Data Security;
-Information Governance & Compliance; and
-Business Continuity
This article concentrates on Business Continuity aspect in the Financial Services Industry, and how Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software can help to achieve this.
Role of DCIM
The Data Center has a myriad of assets both IT and Facilities, besides the mission critical applications themselves that require near 100% uptime. To provide such high availability, FSI Data Centers are built with minimum Tier 3 standards of Uptime Institute. Such standards require redundancies for all categories of equipment. This multiplication of assets, paradoxically, adds to the complexity of business continuity planning (BCP) as DC Managers now have to monitor the entire grid of computing and non-computing equipment, all provisioned with N+1 and sometimes N+2 levels. DC Managers in this industry now unequivocally state that mere redundancies are not good enough. What they need is the ability to predict failures and take proactive action. This can also reduce non-significant over-provisioning and avoidable capital expenditures. In turn, this can also improve asset utilization and reduce power consumption.
Strangely, while business continuity is fundamental to FSI, BCP today is constructed at equipment redundancy level only. There is no predictive analytics to support BCP. This is where Data Center Infrastructure Management or DCIM software can help.
DCIM for BCP
While traditionally DCIM software had concentrated on Energy Efficiency and Asset Management, a new set of Next Generation DCIM software comes with three unique features for BCP:
-Visually defining the entire chain of all asset relationships: application to back-up power, helping to identify missing or weakest links and the redundancy paths;
-Providing alerts when critical thresholds are breached;
-Trending to predict failures based on past incidents and their periodicity.
Configuring Asset Relationships:
Any DCIM Software worth its salt provides powerful drawing tools to configure entire Data Center across its multiple zones and floors with all asset relationships: computing as well as non-computing. This includes:
-Which applications are on which servers and storage: primary and secondary;
-On which racks are these servers and storage mounted;
-The associated network servers, PDUs and UPS
-The configuration of all other equipment: HVAC, chillers, transformers and back-up power.
Drag & drop features help to simulate different configurations that help in both optimizing the asset deployment in the DC as well as in capacity planning.
Once drawn and captured in the database, we know exactly what are the weakest or missing links that has potential to make business continuity vulnerable.
Redundancy paths are mapped to assist immediate identification of alternatives to overcome a failure or (even better) before it occurs as failure predictions are critical for Business Continuity.
Setting Alerts:
This provides the user to set threshold levels for different parameters such as utilization, power and temperature. Automatic alerts are dispatched via email and text messages when such threshold levels are breached to help prevent failures.
Failure Predictions:
Any next generation DCIM Solution is expected to maintain a history of all move-add-change (MAC) decisions as well as a record of prior failures, the moment they happened and their cause. Analytic tools can then make probabilistic forecasts of potential failures based on past data of periodicity of equipment failure over time or prevent a MAC decision that has shown to have been problematic on previous occurrence(s).
