Modius Newsletter - April 2011
In this newsletter:
- See you at AFCOM Data Center World
- Get More from Power, Cooling, and Space with OpenData v3.5
- Inquiring Minds: What is 'chargeback' and why should I care?
See you at AFCOM Data Center World
Your are invited to join us for a live demo of OpenData v3.5 at Data Center World in Las Vegas, booth #629, March 28 - 30. Come see how the latest release of Modius’ flagship product can help you analyze the energy consumed by racks, rows and zones of heterogeneous equipment from any vendor. Let us show you how OpenData software can extend your capacity management capabilities so you can get more utilization from the power, cooling and space of your data center. Learn more:
Get More Utilization from Power, Cooling, and Space with OpenData v3.5
There is only so much you can do on your own to maximize the power, cooling and space in the data center. At certain point, you’ll need some help—some tools—to provide the insight required to eke every kW of power, to know how miserly you can be with cooling, and to ensure every square foot of the data center floor is effectively being used. You can’t rationalize effectiveness by guessing; you need true visibility to get control over your data center!
There is only so much you can do on your own to maximize the power, cooling and space in the data center. At certain point, you’ll need some help—some tools—to provide the insight required to eke every kW of power, to know how miserly you can be with cooling, and to ensure every square foot of the data center floor is effectively being used. You can’t rationalize effectiveness by guessing; you need true visibility to get control over your data center!
OpenData v3.5 adds several important features for data center analysis and visualization. New features provide actionable intelligence, that is, relevant data to help you identify equipment performance anomalies, patterns and trends so you can make decisions with confidence to improve efficiencies and even avoid costly problems down the road. These new capabilities include:
- New User Defined Device Tags: This new multi-point tagging structure allows users to create flexbile grouping of devices that align with business operations. For example, now you can group devices that are assigned to external customers, internal cost centers, or any other grouping that can align critical facility management with business operations.
- New Current Value Reporting: This tabular reporting structure leverages device tags to enable data ‘roll-ups’ and other groupings for analysis of current values. This means you can now generate a customer chargeback report based on actual power consumption or usage data from diverse equipment.
- New Historical & Statistical Analysis Reporting: More reporting capabilities with statistical analysis and other user-defined arithmetic calculations, such as min, max, average, and time integration. Now you can easily attain the right data that fits your context without guessing or having to manually do conversions.
- Improved Visualization Tools: Updates to graphic visualization capabilities that help you more easily identify performance anomalies, patterns and trends so you can literally see how your critical infrastructure is performing and more accurately anticipate capacity thresholds and other operational criteria.
- Major Upgrade to Web Services Interface: Updates to web services interface allows deeper integrations with other reporting or data center management products for federating data and unifying operations. This enables our customers to extend their capacity management capabilities to legacy equipment or to add new devices. Remember: OpenData is completely vendor neutral and highly scalable with no coding required to add new devices or deploy across multiple sites.
For more information please sign up for a free demo at www.modius.com, or come see Modius CEO Craig Compiano present OpenData v3.5 at the Product Information Session at Data Center World on Wednesday, March 30, 9:15am.
Inquiring Minds: What is 'chargeback' and why should I care?
 As data center operators become more proficient with aligning critical facility management with enterprise business initiatives, such as corporate sustainability goals that reel in operating expenses, they are beginning to examine how they can contribute to the bottom line. The ever popular “low-hanging fruit” approach has focused attention on better managing costly resources, like electricity, that will have an immediate impact on reducing operating costs.
By incorporating chargebacks—that is, the practice of transparently accounting for the consumption of a shared resource or service to help manage behavior—data center operators can more effectively manage resource utilization. In principle, once customers (e.g., external customers or internal cost centers) are aware of the cost-benefit value of a resource, they will make more informed decisions about consumption that may reduce cost. As a cost control strategy, chargebacks are an effect way of making immediate impact to the bottom line while alternative solutions are put into place, such as upgrading to green IT and other modern technologies and practices that may further reduce expenses.
Enabling chargebacks requires continuous monitoring and the ability to report usage based by customer. To learn more about how OpenData enables more efficient utilization of power, cooling and space, please see the following recent press articles:
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About Modius
Modius Inc. is a leading provider of management information systems for optimizing data center infrastructure and operations. Modius develops and commercializes real-time monitoring and analytics solutions that enable unified visibility and better control over the critical systems in your data center, including power, cooling and space. The company’s mission is to simplify the operations of the increasingly diverse and complex facilities and IT environment, while markedly improving performance efficiencies. Founded in 2004 with headquarters in San Francisco, California, Modius has customer deployments in the Americas and Internationally.
Information You Need!
Modius has published a number of white papers and documents outlining data center best practices.
Modius Solutions:
Modius Blog!
Are you looking for some more subjective or editorial thought about managing data center infrastructure? Please reference the Modius blog. A few recent submissions:
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