Case Study: How a Medical Facility Improved Data Center Visibility and Asset Management with DCIM Software

Just as our client, a leading medical center and research facility in the United States, has always been on the leading edge of medicine, their data centers have also been regarded as at the forefront of technology. The medical facility already implemented Sunbird’s Power IQ® DCIM Monitoring software to manage their innovative power and cooling environment, and the data center team was pleased with its performance. However, the DCIM tool and homegrown systems used for their asset and change management left much to be desired. In fact, their DCIM was rapidly approaching end-of-life and quickly needed to be replaced.

Data Center Management Challenges

The legacy DCIM tool was difficult to use and expensive to maintain, costing the medical facility tens of thousands of dollars each quarter on development alone. The tool also had a slow and cumbersome process for implementing custom development, limiting their ability to innovate.

Additionally, the medical facility struggled to anticipate and prepare for the impact of changes in their environment. They wanted to be able to see trends and address issues before they became major disruptions. They lacked visibility into their change management and instead had to cobble together reports by pulling information from multiple, disparate systems. Integration with their workflow software was critical to enabling the medical facility to address these challenges.

With nearly 600 racks across eight data centers of varying sizes, the medical facility needed an easy, fast, and complete DCIM solution that would provide greater visibility into their data centers, eliminate planning issues, and enable more efficient asset management.

Solution

The medical facility set out to leverage Power IQ’s power and environmental monitoring with dcTrack’s asset and change management capabilities in a single-pane-of-glass view, making it easy for them to correlate data points for smarter decision making. Integration enables dcTrack to pull power and environmental data so the information can be displayed in business intelligence dashboards and interactive reports, 3D floor map reports, and on asset information pages.

Separate modules are not required to track custom data in Sunbird’s DCIM solution. Through custom fields, the medical facility can track asset data specific to their organization. Custom SQL and HTML widgets enable the medical facility to quickly and easily create their own charts with just the information they’re interested in.  

Tailoring dcTrack to their workflow program gives the facility the flexibility to use their existing flow and see each team’s status for more effective planning. Additionally, using dcTrack to create requests and work orders ensures that that each change can be tracked through the software from creation to completion. As the single source of truth for asset inventory management, dcTrack stores a wide range of data—including make and model, location, U-position, project number, and installation date—for cabinets, CRACs, data panels, rack PDUs, UPSs, IT devices, and other assets. This data is updated automatically as work orders are completed so the database is always accurate.

Results

As a result, the medical facility now can benefit from integrated power monitoring and asset management tools by:

• Increasing visibility into their data centers through 3D floor maps and cabinet elevations with power and temperature readings.
• More accurately assessing and planning for the impact of moves/adds/changes before doing the physical work.
• Customizing dashboards and widgets to their specific use cases.
• Trending data from PDUs and environmental sensors over time so they can spot issues before they become problems and take appropriate action.

With Sunbird’s complete DCIM solution, the medical facility can continue to enhance its reputation in the healthcare industry as a leader, not only in medicine, but in data center efficiency as well. Register for Sunbird’s Webinar now for real world, practical advice on data center management.