IT Asset Management: By the Numbers – What is ITAM?
Table of Contents Part 1 of 5: Introduction to Effective Asset Management The key to the effective and efficient management of an organization’s data center lies with the ability to capture and understand a comprehensive picture of what data center assets exists, where each asset is located and how each individual asset is connected to other assets. As the complexity […]
Controlling Technology Costs and Reducing the Costs of Audits with Comprehensive Asset Management
Table of Contents Computing hardware and software are absolutely essential to modern business operations, but managing the costs of those investments are a huge – and growing – challenge. Businesses of all shapes and sizes, in every industry, struggle to plan procurement costs, track and maximize the use of existing assets, and manage obsolescence in […]
How Can an Asset Management Program Help You Manage Your School District’s Budget?
Table of Contents School districts have a set amount of assets and an increasing number of students that have to use these assets. Every year, administrators have to determine what kind of budget each school within their district has to play with for the coming school year, and part of those calculations includes having an […]
RFID vs. Barcode
Table of Contents So what’s the difference between the two data collection tagging technologies? While RFID and barcodes differ across many areas, they both have a common goal: automate the process of managing assets. RFID tags have many advantages over barcodes; however they have not completely replaced that technology. RFID tags do not require a […]
Passive vs. Active RFID Tags
Passive and Active RFID tags are different technologies that are often evaluated together. Both RFID tags use Radio Frequency (RF) energy to communicate between the tag and readers. Active RFID tags use an internal power source (battery) to continuously power the tag. Their lifespan is determined by the power of the battery, once the battery […]
How to Solve Your Data Center Audit Problems with RFID Tracking
Keeping track of assets is one of the biggest challenges in today’s data centers as they are an ever increasing number of assets inhabiting the data center and the need to track valuable assets is very time consuming and resource intensive effort. Even with ongoing validation of information most are left with information that is […]
What is the real cost of “Ghost servers”?
Our associates were involved with a major data center build and migration for a Fortune 500 customer in the Midwest. The old data center had been in operation for over 20 years and was inadequate to our customer’s needs for the usual reasons, primarily that the support infrastructure was worn out and obsolete. We were […]
7 Must Do’s for Effectively Managing Your Data Center Assets
1) Plan to use fresh inventory data. Sounds simple, but we many struggle trying to use “good enough” data. 2) Test your inventory data. More than 90% of customers think their information is correct when it really isn’t. 3) Plan to hire “Smart hands” that have experience with data center audits. The # 1 reason […]
When is a good time to consider new DCIM tools?
We should always be evaluating the tools we use and their effectiveness in our environment, as well as maintain an understanding of new tools that become available on the market and their capabilities. The data center continues to evolve as a lifeline for any corporation and is a very costly enterprise which is even more […]
Where are your Data Center Assets?
Where are your Data Center Assets? In a world of ever changing technology, critical data center asset management is often put off due to time constraints and conflicting tasks, until an audit is required putting the data center managers in a challenged position. The everyday moves, adds, changes, and decommissions in a data center are […]