Data Center Asset Tracking & Management Software

Data center asset management is the set of business practices designed to join financial, contractual, and inventory functions to support life cycle management and strategic decision making for the IT environment. This involves tracking and managing hardware assets such as servers, server racks, storage, networking, computers and computer networks from acquisition to disposal, as well as software assets such as license entitlements.

Data centers are critical infrastructure, so asset management software can help organizations monitor new assets, prevent theft, collect data, extend the life of power assets, and ensure reliable power and risk management.

Overall, data center asset management is a key tool for any size data center, but especially enterprise level, to ensure that their data centers are running at an optimal level. It can enable organizations to identify potential areas of improvement, ensure their assets are secure, and maximize the efficiency and performance of their data centers.

Resources needed for asset monitoring include: tracking systems, physical inspections, asset tags, barcode scanners, auditing software, inventory reports, network-attached monitoring systems, capacity planning, changing management strategies, virtual and logical systems, power monitoring, system utilization systems, resource consolidation, floor and rack space management, modeling scenarios, and online monitoring systems. Additionally, personnel with deep asset management expertise and electrical engineers for relay protection and post fault analysis may be needed. All of these resources enable data center operations and maintenance teams to improve security, prevent downtime, ensure regulatory compliance, gain critical inventory oversight, establish key workflows, and provide organizational accountability.

Combining different surveillance solutions can significantly improve performance in data center asset management by providing a more comprehensive view of the facility, its operations, and its assets. DCIM solutions can help companies track their assets, monitor environmental and power conditions, and accurately plan for capacity. This can help to eliminate costly, error-prone manual processes, decrease financial inefficiency, and maximize resource utilization. This approach can also help to identify potential risks, such as unauthorized or unplanned changes, and enable the data center to proactively adjust resources in order to avoid potential downtime. This can lead to a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), better data security, lower risk of downtime, increased agility, faster response time to issues, and increased labor efficiency.

In a data center environment, fixed assets should be tracked such as networking equipment, servers, switches, rack PDUs, storage, patch panels, applications, and life safety solutions. These assets should be tracked in real-time to ensure accurate documentation, reduce labor costs, reduce waste and cost, optimize data center availability and utilization, maximize safety and security, and enforce evacuation plans and testing.

Data Center Asset Management system involves the management of physical components of computers and computer networks, software and virtual assets, as well as hardware and software assets. The components of a Data Center Asset Management system include: hardware asset management, software asset management, asset identification, inventory management, request and approval process, procurement management, life cycle management, redeployment and disposal management, license entitlements, IT asset repository, supply chain, help desk, procurement, HR systems, ITSM, financial information capture, rack devices, device modules and blades, floor mounted facilities and IT equipment, operating systems, VM software, utilities, applications, warranty, service contracts, service cycle and lifetimes, business service, application, business unit or department, contact information, and user-defined properties.

The migration of a data center no matter the size is not an easy thing to accomplish. Planning and coordination up front is the key to success!
Prior to migrating equipment having all of the required asset information such as number of devices, device types, application hardware, and software configurations updated is paramount. It is not uncommon for managers to think their data is up to date only to find that during a migration that critical information is missing or inaccurate. This leads to missed commitments and costly and time consuming resolutions during migrations at a time the company can least afford it and windows to get work completed are already tight.

Having an updated/accurate inventory is one of the biggest challenges in the data center today. Barcoding is an improvement over the traditional visual method of validation of assets. RFID is emerging as the technology best suited for tracking assets and keeping asset information updated with the added benefit; accuracy of information increases considerably. In many cases the ROI is surprisingly fast with an ROI often achieved in as little as one year.

With RFID technology migrations become much easier and tracking of equipment through all steps of the migration helps to assure a successful move of technology assets. During the planning phase of a migration project is a great time to upgrade to an RFID solution as you can not only reduce the planning and execution cycles you can ensure that you have an ongoing asset tracking process that will ensure 99.9% accuracy of information.