The biggest DCIM supply side product announcement of 2013 to date was a partnership between IBM and Emerson Network Power. 

It will see a facilities giant and the world’s largest IT company combine efforts around facilities and IT management.

Expect to see a slew of similar tie-ups over the coming weeks with a possible further extension of Schneider Electric’s Struxureware DCIM module integration with Tivoli.

Expect also a similar number of announcements to the effect that ‘X’ DCIM product already works closely with ‘Y’ systems management suite such as HP Operations Manager, Microsoft Systems Center and others.

Inside IBM

The reaction from IBM is best represented by a couple of blogs. One blog from IBM developer works concentrated on ‘root cause’ analysis. It and another management blog emphasised the break fixing possibilities of having an end to end view of the data center. This indicates a prevailing view of facilities as being the providers of power and cooling with all management efforts being put into avoiding the dreaded outages.
Of course, anyone with a view of DCIM knows ‘it is about so much more than that’ delivering as it does, asset and inventory management, operational efficiency, granular monitoring, predictive analysis of moves and changes and even comms and alerts and alarms direct into VM management systems such as Vsphere.

Emerson background

Like many of its competitive offerings, Emerson’s Trellis is not some software backed power meter.

Remember of course that Trellis is the product of a number of acquisitions, Avocent, which specialised in monitoring the physical aspects of server and network devices was bought for $1.2bn in October 2009 and Aperture which it bought for its Vista products in February 2008 for an undisclosed sum.

Steve Hassell, President of Emerson Network Power’s Avocent business, told FOCUS: “The Trellis platform took a long time to come to fruition because it was built completely from the ground up as a purpose built software platform. It is not a loose aggregation of existing products. Since this level of data center-wide infrastructure intelligence had never been possible before, Emerson Network Power created new software and engineering and worked with Oracle to adapt their Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable the platform. Emerson Network Power did lean heavily on the company’s expertise in the data center, as well as the expertise gained from the development and successful global deployments of its existing products in developing this next generation platform.”

Why is the IBM deal significant 
The obvious reason is that the data center is a converging world. It also shows that IBM is taking a total data center view from batteries to applications.

So what are some of the actual listed functionalities of the newly entwined products.

IBM Tivoli has a real estate management module. Emerson Trellis focuses on the product asset level. How many gensets, UPS and PDUs? Aperture Vista is designed to give visability into server and network gear performance. IBM Tivoli also offers inventory and asset management. Tivoli has application performance management.

So while both companies can claim to be able to manage your inventory, one operates at the power chain and wants to work its way up through server and network gear management, the other takes a view of looking down from the application performance and optimising it though cloud and virtualisation.

Tivoli also has  module for monitoring your end point devices.
Tivoli has been around for decades and competes with CA, BMC HP Openview and other big ticket systems management offerings. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, Microsoft System Center Essentials, IBM Tivoli, HP Operations Manager, and StruxureWare Central mobile application integration are supported. 

The context for Emerson is totally different. The field of DCIM is relatively new. The market has attracted many standalone companies and big company divisions.

Schneider Electric’s Tivoli tie in
Last year Schneider announced a specific offering around its Struxureware for data center management platform and Tivoli to share key data points alarm notifications, historical data and asset tracking.
The basis of the announcement was that the solution ‘is based on integration of products from IBM Tivoli and Schneider Electric’s Buildings business.  This integration allows Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare for Data Center Expert management platform, TAC Vista building management system and IBM Tivoli’s software management systems to share key data points.’ 

‘The combined solution will deliver the visibility, control and automation needed for a more efficient enterprise by enabling optimization of data center physical infrastructure and building systems while maintaining IT service levels,’ the company said.

DCIM and systems management
A key aspect of the Emerson deal is that IBM wil resell Emerson’s Trellis platform. 

Tivoli, Trellis and Struxureware show overlap in functionality between what was traditionally been a systems management offering built around IT orchestration and asset utilisation and power and cooling systems management for efficiency.

What is positive for users is that there are options for obtaining an end to end view of the data center from power entering the  building to application performance – even when the application is is running in a virtualised environment in the cloud.

IBM Tivoli Functions:

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management Monitors key energy metrics in the data center provides alerts when critical energy situations are identified. It ties together three types of data center assets:  IT, data center infrastructure, and building automation systems.   

IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Transactions - Tracks and reports application response time and allows the customer to throttle back CPU usage to save power while still providing sufficient response times to achieve SLA’s.

IBM Tivoli Business Services Manager - Helps business and operations staff to understand the complex relationships between business services and supporting technology.  It gives organizations real-time visualization of services and processes in a comprehensive service dependency model.  processes in a comprehensive service dependency model.

IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT - Tracks financial information such as server depreciation, maintenance history, and standard power consumption.  The solution can help a client understand when a legacy server should be replaced with a new, more energy efficient server asset.

IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager and Active Energy Manager - Collects power consumption data, determines kilowatt hours consumed into costs, and then allocates those costs to the users responsible for generating them.  The system holds internal users accountable for energy consumption,