How to solve your data center audit problems with RFID tracking...

Keeping track of assets is one of the biggest challenges in today’s data centers as ther are an ever increasing number of assets inhabiting the data center and the need to track valuable assets is very time consuming and resource intensive effort.  Even with ongoing validation of information most are left with information that is less than 80% accurate. 

Tracking these assets and what they are allocated to is more important than ever for many companies who have a need to validate their asset information and produce reports for various reason such as compliance, capacity planning, maximizing the utilization of assets and lifecycle management to name a few.

Barcoding has been adopted by many users over the past several years and has been a great improvement over the traditional writing on a sheet of paper and then transferring the information to a "central source" (often spreadsheets).  And this increase in touch points leads to many errors and ultimately an inaccurate inventory.  Barcoding has it’s benefits and drawback like any other technology and over time these barcodes may become difficult to read or access if they are not easily accessible. 

RFID tracking is now being leveraged by many data center operations teams to manage assets and automate the previous manual process leading to increased accuracy and productivity.  It takes 10% of the time to perform an inventory audit using RFID technology that it used to take with manual processes.  

Portals allow for tracking of equipment from when it comes into a facility to the storage area, testing development phases and production for the lifespan of the equipment.  This enables more consistent asset tracking and reporting and managers can speak with confidence about the state of their assets and planning is made easier with decisions coming much quicker when the information is readily available. 

Not having a system like this in place in a dynamic environment like a data center can stall important decisions or leave upper management questioning the validity of the middle management’s information.  Having reporting that allows for proactive capacity planning and tracking of productivity of the data center staff enables these middle level managers to gain traction on decision such as upgrades or build out of new facilities.  RFID provides a whole new perspective and opportunity for the data center staffs to utilize their resources more efficiently. 

For questions on RFID technology and how it can work for you contact Asset VUE at http://www.assetvue.net/contact/.

Resolving Data Center Concerns through Regional Forum

Every 3 to 4 months, Asset Vue hosts a regional Data Center Users' Forum (DCUF).  The mission of the DCUF is to provide a commercial free forum where members collaborate on relevant mission-critical issues, new technologies, customer testimonials, and best practices affecting reliability, availability, and lowest cost of operation.  Each forum is a half day committment which is easily divided into three sections: an open forum to discuss the groups "top of mind" concerns, a vendor spotlight, and an End User spotlight.  

Last Friday, the DCUF, which includes IT and facilities professionals from multiple industry types, discussed various topics including:  Data Center Infrastructure Management strategies (DCIM), metering and trending, bridging the gap between IT and Facilities, outsourcing vs. keeping everything in-house, industry power trends, passive RFID asset management,  data center management, containment, power outage/root cause analysis.

 

We concluded the meeting with a presentation on ITIL RCA (Root Cause Analysis) by a nationally recognized speaker and ITIL expert.    

Migrations – The right time to implement RFID

The migration of a data center no matter the size is not an easy thing to accomplish.  Planning and coordination up front is the key to success!   

  Prior to migrating equipment having all of the required asset information such as number of devices, device types, application hardware, and software configurations updated is paramount.  It is not uncommon for managers to think their data is up to date only to find that during a migration that critical information is missing or inaccurate.  This leads to missed commitments and costly and time consuming resolutions during migrations at a time the company can least afford it and windows to get work completed are already tight.

Having an updated/accurate inventory is one of the biggest challenges in the data center today.  Barcoding is an improvement over the traditional visual method of validation of assets.  RFID is emerging as the technology best suited for tracking assets and keeping asset information updated with the added benefit; accuracy of information increases considerably.  In many cases the ROI is surprisingly fast with an ROI often achieved in as little as one year.

With RFID technology migrations become much easier and tracking of equipment through all steps of the migration helps to assure a successful move of technology assets.  During the planning phase of a migration project is a great time to upgrade to an RFID solution as you can not only reduce the planning and execution cycles you can ensure that you have an ongoing asset tracking process that will ensure 99.9% accuracy of information.

For more information on RFID technology and what it can do for you look at www.assetvue.com.

8 Reasons why RFID makes sense for the data center

8 Reasons why RFID makes sense for the data center

Knowing where all the assets are is a key initiative for nearly all data center teams and IT groups.  Without that information it is difficult to find servers when they need to be repaired, identify depreciation, or lifecycle concerns.  RFID is a mature technology proven to improve inventory gathering and management, tracking of assets as they move through your organization and even helping to organize a migration from one facility to another. 

1. Time: Current manual inventory takes approximately 1 hour per rack when you include validation of data in asset inventory.  Leveraging RFID this is reduced to less than 1 minute per rack.
    
2. Morale: High talent resources are used to gather or validate asset inventory often taking weeks of time to do so. With the time saved leveraging RFID about 90% of your resources time would be recovered to do other work.
    
3. Convenience:  Asset tags and barcodes often are placed in locations that are difficult to get an accurate read of the barcode.  Often these labels are obstructed by cables, rack components and they are difficult to read.  With RFID you get 100% read of all equipment.
    
4. Granularity:  Tracking components internal to equipment such as blades or storage is easily tracked using RFID technology. 
    
5. Find it fast:  Tracking equipment within a facility (or across multiple facilities) is possible with RFID.  Equipment can be tracked as it enters a facility and followed anywhere in the facility.
    
6. Accuracy: RFID is a mature technology that is prven successful in many applicaitons.  
    
7. ROI:  Get a return on your investment in as little as a year.  This might be one fo the most cost effective projects you complete all year!
    
8. Usability:  DCIM tools that leverage RFID are more effective using updated information.

How Asset Vue came to be an innovator in Data Center Management

How Asset Vue came to be an innovator in Data Center Infrastructure Management

Our team has lived in data centers for 70+ years collectively, serving as either as an advisor or the end user leading a data center team.  18-months ago we were discussing some best practices and tools with a client and they started to express some frustrations around their DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) tool. The tool itself was not the problem per se, they had done their homework and the tool was the right tool for their needs, but the initial setup and ongoing upkeep was not the Promised Land they had expected.  

The client was interested in talking to others in similar situations, so we invited him to a local Data Center User Forum we conducted a few times a year to bring his concern to the group for some answers.  Turned out that his plight was far from unique.  There was some consensus amongst the group who collectively had used a half a dozen different DCIM tools.  For as valuable as the tools were (not one member was willing to give up a DCIM tool), they created their own sets of problems:

-      Commissioning - Initial setup was arduous and often cost as much money to implement as it had to purchase.

-      Inventory – There was no magic bullet to make the initial data collection any easier. 

• Many felt they had a “good inventory” only to get into implementation to find 20-40% inaccuracies making them revisit their project plans and adding a costly step. 
• Those who could afford it outsourced their inventory, but you had to be ready to immediately populate the DCIM to be effective.
• Alternately, they sent their staff off with clipboards and print outs, but rarely could anyone devote the time to push through and do the inventory in one pass, so before the data ever hit the DCIM tool it was typically outdated, making the first audit that much more critical. 

-      Audit/Validation – Once the DCIM was in place and the data all inserted, you still need to validate.  Even in the most regimented of organizations with good change control techniques the data would get out of date as data centers are constant sources of change.  So the same employees or consultants were called in regularly to manually audit the data center assets and update the DCIM. 

So we set out to make these tasks easier…

-      Services - Developed a network of qualified “Smart hands” and DCIM experts that could make short work of setting up the tools more efficient. 

-      Quick inventory tool – By making an easy to use and fast data collection application that ran on a laptop, we eliminated the double entry as well as the inaccuracies that a 2 step data collection inevitably brings with it. 

-      RFID based audit tool – Utilizing passive RFID we can audit a rack in roughly 1 minute.  That translates into a full audit of a 10,000 square foot data center could be complete in less than a day.  Previously an audit of that magnitude was running 14+ days.

-      Smart Move -  Migrating out of an older facility or from a colo, etc. is a costly experience.  Using the Asset Vue Migration license we cut the time to inventory the assets you plan to move (a critical step to verify you know where the products are before you are at move day and panicked to get everything done in the time you have allotted). 

-      Asset Secure – Assets are moving in and out of data centers at an unprecedented pace.  Move to/from colo, switch colo's, DR sites, back and forth from production and staging areas, decommission, etc.  Tracking the history of the moves, seeing "last seen" to know which area it was last recognized, even who was near the equipment as it moved and notifying a data center engineer an asset is on the move or creating a change ticket in you CMDB are all available "out of the box".   

DCIM tools are one of the most important technologies an operator can implement to make their data center more efficient, and Asset Vue is dedicated to making the processes required to make DCIM work streamlined, fast and efficient.  Come join us on our journey!