GFS Crane DC: The Next Gen DCIM Software
GreenField’s DCIM software, GFS Crane DC is a next generation DCIM that helps in
- Comprehensive asset management of both IT and Facility infrastructure of the data center
- Tracking power consumption and calculating energy cost for the data center till device level
- Measuring PUE of the data center at real-time and benchmarking present efficiency level with industry standard
- Improving energy efficiency of the data center through intelligent recommendations
- Better capacity planning for power, space and network through modeling, simulations and ‘what-if’ analysis.
- Improving data center availability through intelligent alert management, asset relationship mapping and impact analysis of failure
- Sustainability reporting for the data center and recommending ways to make the data center ‘Greener’
GFS Crane DC: The Next Gen DCIM at a glance
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Data Center Asset Management
- The DCIM does auto discovery and inventory collection of intelligent assets on a TCP/IP network
- It creates a single repository for IT & Facility assets in the data center
- The DCIM auto detects any change in asset configuration and helps keeping asset information up-to-date all the time
- The software comes with a Manufacturer Repository called GFS Crane MR that provides information on all static attributes of assets such as physical dimensions, power ratings, environmental specifications etc.
- It helps in rationalizing the asset base of the data center by identifying those assets which delivers business value
- The DCIM helps in mapping of critical relationships and dependencies among assets, applications and business units thereby helping in better impact analysis of a failure
- It tracks physical location of assets in the data center through modeling and simulation
- It helps in optimizing IT asset utilization by performance benchmarking
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Energy Tracking & Energy Efficiency
- Soft-metering: GFS Crane DC DCIM comes with the unique capability to measure power consumption of servers, IT devices like network and storage devices and racks without hardware energy meters or sensors
- It also supports hardware based power metering for both IT and Facility devices by integrating with external energy meters, iPDUs and BMS
- It identifies top power consumers in the data center
- The DCIM reports power consumption trends for peak and lean time
- It calculates real-time PUE and compares with industry benchmark
- It calculates multi-level PUE for the data center as per Green Grid recommendations and helps in identifying power distribution losses
- It reports power consumed by non-production applications, legacy applications, under-utilized servers and old equipment and recommends ways to reduce total power requirement for the data center
- Improvement in energy efficiency in percentage terms can be set as a target in the DCIM’s policy section and the recommendations are done considering the target set
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Capacity Planning
- The DCIM does a base-lining of the existing power and space capacity of the data center and predicts future capacity requirement based on real-time & historical data and ‘what-if’ analysis
- Impact on power and space capacity can be predicted by simulating move, add & change within the DCIM
- The software helps in identifying the best place to provision a new device or rack on the data center floor by evaluating required versus available power and space capacities
- The capacity planning module of the DCIM can be effectively used during data center migration or consolidation projects to avoid over/under provisioning of power and space
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Business Continuity
- GFS Crane DC DCIM comes with comprehensive alert management capability that can warn users in advance of abnormal conditions, such as a threshold breach in any of the critical parameters in the data center. This helps in preventing a disaster situation for Captives as well as Multi-Tenant Data Centers.
- Alerts can be viewed on a dashboard or sent through email or SMSs to designated support staffs and escalation points
- The DCIM maps critical relationships and dependencies among hardware assets, applications and business units which helps in doing impact analysis of a failure or notifying a user group in advance regarding a planned downtime in case of a preventive maintenance
- All IMAC events in the data center can be logged in the DCIM which can be used to do the root cause analysis of an outage that may have been triggered by a change
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Energy Billing
- GFS Crane DC DCIM has the capability to proportionately allocate power consumption and cost for each business unit served by a captive data center or for each customer in a Multi-tenant data center, in the form of Energy Bills or Charge-back Reports
- The DCIM can even report power consumption and cost for individual physical and virtual servers that host the applications owned by different business units/customer
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Sustainability Reporting
- GFS Crane DC calculates GHG emission for a data center till the device level
- Carbon footprint for different business units/customers or by different classes of equipment can be calculated using the DCIM
- By doing an aging analysis of all equipment in the data center and calculating power consumption and GHG emission for each device, the DCIM helps in identifying e-waste in the data center
