Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is a term the industry uses to describe tools that help companies make intelligent informed decisions regarding their data centers. There are solutions on the market that do less than that, and there are solutions that do a lot more, but the description is a fair one.

It is a new category of software, seeking to unify the multitude of tools data center managers have been using for decades. It's just that there are a lot more data centers to manage now.

Additionally, there is also a need now to make the data DCIM tools collect available to business groups outside of data center management. This data needs to be presented in ways these groups can understand.

DCIM was one of the strongest running themes at this year's Converged conference by DatacenterDynamics in New York City in March. It was the subject of the event's closing panel, where seasoned industry professionals talked about its past, present and future.

Back to the future

One of the panelists, Chris Crosby, CEO of the US wholesale data center provider Compass, said DCIM was essentially the industry's attempt to recreate the management capabilities it used to have with mainframes in today's distributed environments. “I think, at a base level, we're trying to get back to the future,” he said.

It is an attempt to maximize infrastructure utilization in the new distributed-infrastructure paradigm. Paul Fox, head of enterprise data center operations infrastructure and white space at Morgan Stanley, said the distributed environment does not easily offer exact data on components and available capacity mainframes offered, while DCIM tools attempt to unify data from disparate systems.

Growing pains

What we are seeing is only the beginning of the DCIM market, and it is going through the same phases all new markets go through. Nic Bustamante, manager of data center operations engineering at Microsoft, says this space is mimicking the adoption pattern virtualization technology had.

Lots of business owners were afraid to virtualize their server infrastructure when the technology became available initially. There were, however, few early adopters who lead the way, and today, virtualization is pervasive across the IT world.

“You're going to see the same thing with the DCIM market,” Bustamante says. It may not become the data center operating system for everybody, but it will be one for many companies sooner or later.

This will happen because common management tools like Building Management Systems (BMS) do not provide the contextually rich views into data center infrastructure DCIM tools promise to provide. A typical BMS does not, for example, easily show equipment within an IT rack and provide the context of what impact it is having on power and cooling capacity of the facility as a whole.

Too early for DCIM automation

Some companies, especially the big electrical and mechanical infrastructure vendors that have DCIM products, have been pushing the idea of automating infrastructure management through DCIM. In Crosby's opinion, the industry is a long way from that.

“There's no way I'd do automation at the DCIM [level],” he says. “I'm not a big fan of trying to automate from afar.”

At the moment, DCIM is more of a tool for providing management information as opposed to being a tool to do dynamic changes in the infrastructure. Glen Neville, director of engineering at Deutsche Bank, agrees, saying data center managers, at least for the near future, will use DCIM like they use BMS: as a recommendation engine.

At Deutsche Bank, the BMS prints out recommendations, which the engineering team will implement only if they decide the recommendations are good. This is because the system often makes recommendations they do not agree with.

More big data in DCIM

What end users like Microsoft would like to see in the DCIM products of the future is better use of big data. “I haven't seen anybody go after unstructured data in the DCIM world, and I think that is a big deal for most folks,” Bustamante says.

Companies shopping for DCIM solutions usually have more than one data center to manage, which means their data centers are of different age and have different systems inside of them. This creates a lot of unstructured data which a DCIM system of the future could help customers harness and use to their advantage.

“You need to have that in your DCIM world,” Bustamante says. “I think that's a completely untapped market.”

Money talks

Ultimately, as Crosby puts it, the DCIM solutions that are going to be successful are going to be ones that make end users money. It is hard to make a business case for spending money on an additional tool to run the data center.

If a service provider can use a DCIM solution to implement a billing platform, for example, that DCIM solution will be popular. It is harder to convince business leaders to invest in something that will simply make operations easier than to show a specific way the business is going to benefit.

“It's just applying it to the areas that make the most money first,” Crosby says. “It's got to be a specific case that they're trying to address.”

A version of this article appeared in the 29th edition of theDatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine, out now.