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 often looked at as mundane and time-consuming tasks. Tracking those changes often gets pushed to the side for other important initiatives and consequently before you know it, you have lost track of where your assets are within your data center.
Without proper management and sound processes, a data center’s efficiency and performance ultimately suffers. Software products fall out of sync. Important hardware updates and patches are missed. Missing equipment can go unnoticed without you even realizing anything went wrong.
Building an efficient data center asset management process ensures you are operating at top performance and will help you to streamline inventory. A proper inventory helps you comply with financial and legal auditing and reporting mandates. It allows you to quickly navigate to a failed server when time matters the most to get it back online and utilize hardware that may otherwise get lost in inventory.
Ways to get your asset inventory back on track include, hiring a team of Data Center inventory specialists to come on site and provide you a baseline inventory to get you up to date. After they turn over your updated inventory set, it’s time to put a plan into action to ensure your data stays accurate. This includes finding IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions, like ISA’s OSPI® which gives you ITAM in your hands on a mobile device, allowing you to log your moves, adds, changes, and decommissions at the point of time they occur in your data center. Maintaining monthly or quarterly audit schedules also helps ensure your data is staying accurate throughout the year.
Using RFID tagging technology will also help to significantly streamline the inventory and audit process that works best for your data center. RFID tags can send alerts when IT assets are removed from their rack or when they move out of a designated location. A manual audit that used to take weeks using a spreadsheet can be cut down to just hours using RFID tags.
