Did you know that data centers are some of the most energy-intensive buildings? They consume 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical office building. As governments, industry regulators, and customers demand more energy efficient data centers, data center managers are tasked to comply with corporate sustainability initiatives by finding new ways to innovate and reduce energy consumption.

Data center consolidation involves reducing the number of servers, storage, network systems, racks, or entire data center sites to improve IT efficiency and create a more streamlined environment with lower space, power, and cooling requirements. As businesses migrate their workloads to the cloud or virtualize servers, the need for physical space decreases. This prompts companies to downsize their footprint, utilizing existing resources more and alleviating data center management challenges.

For many data center professionals, the daily operations of a data center require a lot of repetitive manual data entry tasks. Manually entering data about data center assets over and over again is not only time-consuming, but it risks inaccurate information due to human error. However, there is a new way forward.

As a global leader in second-generation Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, we have the opportunity to speak with a lot of data center professionals. One of the most common stories we hear is that they are still using Excel, Visio, open-source software, and homegrown tools to manage their data centers and that these tools are causing them a lot of pain. They're manually intensive, inaccurate, hard to use, and not integrated.

Did you know that the data center industry accounts for 3% of global electricity consumption and is expected to hit 4% by 2030? Due to rising energy costs and increased public pressure around the environmental impact of data centers, many of today’s organizations have launched corporate sustainability initiatives and data center professionals are cracking down on energy usage to support those goals.

Data center professionals have reached a breaking point. Data center infrastructure has grown too complex and distributed to manage with legacy tools like Excel, Visio, and homegrown systems. Manually updating multiple spreadsheets and diagrams for every change in the data center takes too much time and the information is too inaccurate to trust.

Data center management traditionally requires a lot of manual effort, and the same data often must be entered into multiple disparate systems. Not only does this waste time, but it leads to inaccurate data due to human error.

We’re proud to announce the general availability of dcTrack® 9.0, the latest version of Sunbird’s DCIM Operations software. This release includes exciting new features including XYZ.

Managing a data center traditionally requires entering the same information multiple times into disparate tools. This is a manual effort that is time-consuming and error-prone. Leading data center professionals don’t waste time swiveling between different tools. Instead, they implement “automation via integration” that saves time and increases the accuracy of data.

Main Distribution Frames (MDF) and Intermediate Distribution Frames (IDF) are integral components of modern data communication networks. Buildings or campus facilities have one or more MDFs which are the demarcation points where public or private telecommunication networks interconnect with the internal network. The MDF then connects to any number of IDFs in the building, and the devices in those IDFs connect to end devices such as workstations.