One of the largest independent information technology and business process services firm in the world, serves its global clients from offices and delivery centres across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, providing a comprehensive portfolio of services including high-end business and IT consulting, systems integration, application development and maintenance, infrastructure management, as well as a wide range of proprietary solutions.
In the UK this Multinational Information Technology company operates a number of data centres that offer vital, 24/7 availability of IT systems and services. The UK Data Centre Manager, explains, ‘These state-of-the-art facilities are at the heart of our customers’ operations and we continually invest in them to ensure that we offer unrivalled levels of uptime. We also aim to ensure that our data centres are as energy efficient as possible in order to help meet our own sustainability based objectives and those of our customers. We are proud to be a member of the Uptime Institute and The Green Grid, both of which offer best practice guidance for data centre operation.’
The investment in a global improvement programme for its data centres, is paying off in terms of service reliability and cost efficiency. One element of this programme is to ensure that each component part of its data centres is accounted for, monitored and managed, so that they can be fully utilised. Given that there are over 1,000 42U racks in total housing over 15,000 separate devices including switches, servers and cabling, an accurate, easy to manage and fully scalable solution was needed. When assessing which system to use, the Data Centre Manager felt that Toshiba TEC partner, Trackit Solutions, could fulfil all the requirements.
‘Many companies rely on highly complex data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) systems designed to automate, monitor and standardise practices but very often the source information at ground level is inaccurate, leading to incorrect reporting,’ comments Steve Beber, Trackit’s managing director. ‘By combining an intuitive application interface with the latest mobile technology, our solution allows Multinational Information Technology companies to track every physical asset in its data centre while drastically reducing man-hours and human error. Trackit knows where the IT assets are and highlights any discrepancies, helping the Data Centre Manager and his team to run their data centres more efficiently.’
Trackit delivers infrastructure audits with 99 per cent accuracy and aside from being faster and more accurate than traditional systems, it’s also really simple to use. After carrying out a fully review of the data centre infrastructure, Trackit configured a solution to meet its specific asset management needs.
After completing a successful small-scale trial, the Trackit solution was rolled out across the entire estate over a three-month period. Becky Viccars, marketing manager for auto-ID and retail products at Toshiba TEC, says, ‘Our B-EP2-GH40 wireless portable printers were used to print barcodes encoded with detailed information that were then affixed directly to the IT assets that needed to be tracked. The clear backlit LCD read-out on the B-EP2-GH40 improves user friendliness and operator training times and the display also features a label counter, battery level, wireless signal strength and error messages. A high endurance lithium ion battery ensures many hours of operation, which was vital for this project to ensure it was completed on time.’
Without this software, optimising racks was a difficult and problematic process, as a manual audit process was needed to see what was available in each data centre. This was almost impossible due to the time it took and every time moves, adds and changes (MACs) were made the manual record became inaccurate.
Now the barcoding is completed, by using a handled wireless LightTouchID scanner linked to the Trackit system operatives are able to carry out an audit by simply scanning down every rack to see what equipment is being used, including the model and manufacturer. It also identifies what’s new and, just as importantly, what has been removed or altered. Lists of the audited barcodes are then cross referenced with what has been purchased to provide proof to client that everything they have paid for is in place.
Information about power consumption can also be accessed, so that each rack’s power and cooling data can be managed more effectively. The Data Centre Manager states, ‘We can also produce optimisation reports to ensure the most efficient use of the racks for the customer. This allows us to identify whether any equipment should be reconfigured and, if necessary, decommissioned. It’s all about achieving maximum space utilisation and energy efficiency and by using Trackit we made £135,000 of savings in the first year, and I estimate that we will get a total return investment in less than 12 months.’
Tel: 0843 2244 944
Email: info@toshibatec.co.uk
Comments are closed.