Data Center Infrastructure Management (Dcim) Solutions Explained

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) refers to the discipline of managing and optimizing the operations and performance of your data center infrastructure.

A vast subject, DCIM emerged in response to the growing complexity of IT infrastructure systems.

Let’s take a look at the basics of this topic.

(This article is part of our Data Center Operations Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Data center infrastructure is complex

Ever since business organizations adopted networked computing technologies, the demands for computing resources evolved haphazardly.

In recent decades, requirements around scalability, performance, security, and operations have forced IT to adopt rapid changes to the underlying infrastructure all too often. As technology evolves to address the growing demands of the modern enterprise, new hardware gradually replaces old ones while IT struggles to manage the hybrid mix of latest and legacy data center systems.

The lack of a comprehensive integrated control system for hardware assets gave rise to the need for a purpose-built enterprise-class data center management suite. Enter DCIM.

(Smoothly migrate your data center with this checklist.)

What is data center infrastructure management?

In simple terms, DCIM is a software solution that delivers the processes and tools necessary to manage data center environments in a structured way. A DCIM tool could be the center point of your data center management.

One key value proposition of DCIM is its ability to manage change workflows at the physical layer in connection with the software applications that run on top of them.

DCIM also helps IT optimize the supply of computing resources against the changing demand.

For example, IT is encouraged to minimize the cost of per-unit operations of computing resources while satisfying the peak demand when necessary. Enterprises cannot invest enough in expensive data center technologies to match the peak demands on operational capacity. Instead, they rely on cloud infrastructure resources that seamlessly integrate into their IT environment.

DCIM technology uses a critical set of metrics that consider the performance of virtual instances, autonomously matching operations between resource demand and supply.