Many IT organizations owning data centers need to manage thousands of assets, reduce energy costs, and meet corporate environmental goals, and Intel’s IT organization shares those same concerns. Many tools address these challenges specifically for a variety of individual types of data center elements like servers, network devices, and facilities equipment. While those various highly focused management tools are critical, Intel IT’s data center team looked for a solution that could solve key challenges while providing a single pane of glass into data center elements. The team explored using Intel® Data Center Manager (Intel® DCM) and found that it can provide a tremendous value to a data center management team. Intel IT’s department recently published a white paper called “Intel® Data Center Manager: A Powerful Tool for Data Center Efficiency, Management, and Sustainability” that describes how it uses Intel DCM to manage its data centers. Intel DCM provided clear benefits in managing assets for accounting and auditing, reducing power consumption, and tracking carbon emissions among other benefits in an environment where compute and storage growth averaged more than 30% growth every year.
Intel DCM works by using standard monitoring protocols like IPMI, SNMP, and Redfish to gather data from equipment. This gives it visibility into a wide variety of devices in the data center and their sensors and data. Intel DCM can access internal server temperature sensors. When collected and displayed in Intel DCM using the positions of those servers (see Figure 1), this sensor data can provide a literal and figurative heatmap of the data center and can indicate where there might be cooling issues.
Access to servers through standard protocols provides Intel DCM with a way to track data center resources. Rather than physically placing bar codes on servers, which become increasingly difficult as servers get smaller, a data center management team can use Intel DCM to pull serial numbers directly from servers and track them that way. An audit of the entire data center can take in just minutes.
Intel DCM provides other benefits, such as the ability to trend and track the carbon emissions generated by a data center, as shown in Figure 2. DCM gives us the ability to oversubscribe (in terms of power) the systems in a rack. in the “edge,” areas that have IT equipment but are too small to be considered full-fledged data centers. While Intel DCM is deployed in our largest data centers, we will also be deploying in our other data centers, include those on the edge.
For more details on the benefits of Intel DCM and our plans, please check out our white paper on this subject. You can find more information on Intel’s DCM here:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/software/intel-dcm-product-detail.html.