Understand Your Infrastructure
How do you maintain a pulse on an environment that is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage? How do you obtain access to real-time information to effectively respond to changes caused by both internal and external forces? What steps can you take to ensure you are optimally using resources to improve energy efficiency and supporting "green" initiatives within the organization? These are only some of the key challenges facing data center executives today.

The data center is a rapidly-evolving entity containing hundreds, or even thousands, of devices procured from a wide range of manufacturers with varying protocols. Each device must be understood and monitored - to ensure it is functioning properly on a day-to-day basis; to identify how it ties into and supports the overall organization; and to evaluate how the environment, applications and systems it supports will be impacted should it fail.

Data center executives often battle to provide sufficient infrastructure resources for the equipment within the data center, while keeping costs low. Significant cost savings can be realized if only the demands on the infrastructure are better understood. For example, the use of integrated, real-time data with multi-dimensional perspectives helps to accurately depict the use of power and cooling resources and to allow for appropriate infrastructure right-sizing. This discipline of right-sizing prevents organizations from under-provisioning the infrastructure - which could lead to costly downtime - as well as over-provisioning resources - which could translate to millions of wasted investment dollars. Only by obtaining an IT view into the data center facility can organizations gain an accurate, real-time snapshot of the current state of the data center infrastructure.

Monitoring the Vital Signs of the Data Center Infrastructure
Aperture VISTA Infrastructure Monitoring is the active component of Aperture's holistic data center management system that provides an integrated IT view into the data center facility. With this solution, organizations can gain centralized access to capacity information allowing for more accurate forecasts for future requirements and effectively right-size the infrastructure to meet business demands. In addition, as energy becomes an increasingly diminishing resource and a major focal point for implementing "green" initiatives, Aperture VISTA Infrastructure Monitoring can assist data center managers with improving overall energy efficiency through more accurate measurement practices.

As a Web-based, vendor-neutral solution, the Aperture VISTA Infrastructure Monitoring module enables organizations to monitor the status and impact of the critical data center infrastructure through a "single pane of glass". Organizations can achieve:

• Improved capacity planning through the inclusion of real-time data
• Enhanced data accuracy by providing name plate, de-rated and real-time data
• Integrated data from various sources combined for better decision making
• Improved energy efficiency through more exact measurements
• Vendor-neutral alerting system and alarm dashboard
• Understanding of infrastructure performance (i.e., power, cooling, environmental) through real-time monitoring
• Root-cause and impact analysis of planned and/or unplanned outages
• Real-time values for key data center metrics - including efficiency, power and cooling

Click on the image above for a larger view.

Sample screen shot identifying VISTA Infrastructure Monitoring's multiple views of the the data center - including device status, temperature (shown here), humidity, power or UPS load.