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.

Migrating to a cloud model would reduce costs and let me focus on consumption pricing; reduce complexity by moving backend software and hardware support to the provider; and increase agility by letting my developers use all those nifty new tools that were emerging daily from cloud providers. The data center was heading the way of the dinosaurs! All was good. Everyone was happy. Well, in theory anyway. Until reality kicked in.

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.

The direction of travel for business technology is one-way. The momentum towards strategies around decentralised, hybrid technologies is unstoppable. Examples abound, from the composable software stacks of e-commerce to the ongoing death of monolithic ERP. Modern, digitally-driven business is based on a dynamic alignment of resources, data and technology at the granular level, which is then coordinated precisely.