Custom RFID data center inventory management with a rapid national roll out.
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 center industries face plenty of challenges, and that has led to an increase in the importance of data center asset tracking. This process is important because it checks many boxes that data center locations face throughout the lifespan and day-to-day operation of their assets.
Data centers are critical locations with plenty of contingencies to avoid faults or failures. Data center asset management software ensures that assets have appropriate levels of protection for all of the challenges these locations face. The fact of the matter is that industries need data to operate, and interrupted data flows can halt any operation. Additionally, organizations must focus on ensuring reliable power and risk management.
With data center asset management software, our team provides the following benefits for your organization:
Don’t neglect the importance of these benefits. Grow your organization like never before with data center inventory management software today!
vXchnge, a national colocation provider with data centers across the US, needed to know the location and status of their customers’ servers in real time. They were looking for real-time data center asset tracking and asset inventory management in all their data centers nationwide.
Providing real-time inventory status and asset tracking were additional services vXchnge’s customers had requested and would be a key differentiator for vXchnge among its competitors. But more than that, these services are necessary today for security and compliance purposes.
In addition to solving for an almost simultaneous national rollout, vXchnge also needed this solution to be deployed at a price point per unit or location that worked for their pricing structure and was in line with their competitive landscape and customers’ expectations.
The Asset Vue team has decades of combined experience managing data centers of all shapes and sizes. We understand the data center environment and the importance of reliability, scalability, and accuracy for any data center asset tracking and inventory management solution.
With our data center inventory software, we redefine the ease and simplicity of managing your data. Our software tracks and stores data, giving you real-time reporting and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and rules. But we know that it’s not enough to walk the walk. That’s why we come well-equipped with experience that proves our data center inventory management software can work for you.
Asset Vue partnered on this project with Impinj, a world-class leader in the manufacturer of RAIN RFID (radio-frequency identification devices). Our teams came together to develop a 100% custom suite of hardware, software, and processes to solve vXchnge’s unique inventory management challenge.
As a result of this partnership, vXchnge was able to offer a competitively priced asset tracking service to all its clients nationally. By working with Asset Vue’s deployment teams, the vXchnge teams on the ground could roll the new service out consistently across all locations according to the company’s desired time frame and within the required budget.
You can hear directly from the teams involved in this project about precisely what solutions were deployed and what the results looked like by watching a recording of a webinar with Gary Aron, Partner and co-founder at Asset Vue; Wendy Werblin, Director of Industry Solutions at Impinj; and Tom Banta, Senior VP Product Management & Development at vXchnge.
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.
Team up with Asset Vue and get the DCIM software for your data center asset management needs.
See how our data center inventory management team can tailor a cost-effective RFID inventory solution to your data center’s unique asset tracking challenges.
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