“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
One company’s critical capacity is another’s irrelevant metric. Cormant-CS DCIM comes out-of-the-box with over fifty capacity data points. These can then be added to or removed as required to meet the business needs of each enterprise.
Cormant-CS supports unlimited external data capture, and aggregation, along with robust reporting, visual dashboards, trending and alerting. Data can be exchanged with external systems such as CMDB or network monitoring solutions. A typical enterprise may begin with a core set of metrics that address immediate challenges and then expand thoseover time.
Capacity Planning Metrics
While not a complete list of possible metrics used for capacity management, some of the more typical measurements captured in Cormant-CS are delivered as part of the out-of-the-box solution. Metrics Cormant-CS can capture and calculate include:
- Rack Units: free/used/contagious space
- Power: actual, plate, de-rated
- Circuit capacity
- Real time capacity data from any equipment or sensor
- Port and data connections: free, used, type, service
- Cooling capacity and distribution
- Free/used floor space
- Blades, cards and slots in chassis
- Rooms capacity; IDF/MDF/Campus spaces
- Virtual servers and their distribution
- VLAN/Rack Pod/Service Environments
- On-order and in-stock equipment and allocation
- Cable inventory
- Free outlets across a campus
- Backbone and conduit use
- Historical trends
- Changes planned
- In transit equipment between sites
- Capacity true-up audits using mobility and/or network discovery
- Industry metrics, including: PUE, DCSE, DCOI (Fed Gov)
Keeping Capacity Data Accurate
Data in Cormant-CS DCIM has to be accurate to be useful, and to be useful it has to be easy to update; a founding principle of Cormant-CS. Cormant-CS enables easy updates, by:
- Strong simple UI, to enter data and also to use the data entered, so people want to use it
- Full on-line and off-line mobility with RFID and Barcode scanning for quick and simple updates as change is made and full scan based mobile auditing
- Network discovery to link physical to discovery data
- Change management and links to CMDB and ITSM systems.
- External devices/sensors
Use of Capacity Data for Planning
Cormant-CS enables enterprises to consume capacity data in multiple graphical and textual formats and the data can also be exported and exchanged with external systems, including CMDB and ITSM solutions.
Any data can be aggregated and where multiple sites exist data can be compared on a site-by-site bases.
Data Consumption and Visualization
- Full, widget based, user configurable dashboards of historical and current data.
- Three-dimensional floor plans and rack elevations, including user defined capacity color coding of rack and equipment.
- Comparison multiple metrics of a similar type, e.g. power plate, actual and estimated per device, rack and data center
- Custom reports, including a full built-in report writer.
- Scheduled reporting and exports in multiple formats.
- Alerting on user-defined capacity points
- Work-flow location selector, providing guidance on the best permitted location for new equipment. Criteria can be configured to meet each enterprise custom requirements.
- Full de-normalized historical data capture for long term trending.
- Full life-cycle equipment and asset data to port level to see history of an asset from order to disposal, including every change made to any data element.
- Two-way Interfaces to external systems.
Cormant-CS
Cormant-CS offers a unique blend of configuration flexibility, data management options and comes as a single complete solution, providing assurance of a solution that can grow with your enterprise.
Cormant has been providing DCIM and Campus infrastructure management solutions since 2003 and has hundreds of customers on five contents, ranging from a few racks to tens of thousands.
Cormant’s dedicated staff can help tailor the right package of software and services for you and will then deliver a fully implemented solution to your enterprise. Contact Cormant for a personal evaluation of your needs and tailored live product demonstration.
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