While for smaller data center operators decisions on technological solutions generally involve weighing options different vendors have made available on the market, for Internet businesses whose massive data center facilities contain all of their vital organs, there is also the option of doing it themselves.

In many cases, companies like Facebook, much of whose business success depends on the quality of its data center infrastructure, have found the do-it-yourself option to be the best one. The social-network company has designed its own data centers and much of what goes inside them, including IT gear and mechanical and electrical infrastructure components.

When time came to make a decision on what kind of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution Facebook’s infrastructure team should use to manage its massive portfolio, DIY turned out to be the only viable option. Tom Furlong, VP of site operations at Facebook, says the company has been developing its own DCIM solution that will most likely end up being a combination of home-grown and third-party elements.

What will it do?

Like any conversation about DCIM that takes place nowadays, Facebook’s conversation started by trying to figure out what the acronym means to Facebook. “Part of the challenge is just defining what DCIM is,” Furlong says.

“Today, we are developing some solutions in order to basically knit together the information we have in the data center with all of the information we have in our servers. For us, DCIM is the system that helps connect these two areas of information.”

The project’s ultimate goal is to build a system that will help the team find most efficient ways to fill the company’s data center buildings with racks of servers, Furlong said in an interview at the DatacenterDynamics Converged conference in San Francisco on 12 July. He was one of the keynote speakers at the event.

Facebook has built a custom repository for server data, which holds information such as a server’s physical location, its configuration (CPU, memory, storage, etc.), its power consumption, CPU utilization and so on. “We know what logical cluster it belongs to, what function it’s supposed to be performing,” Furlong says.

At the same time, the facilities are instrumented with tools for power monitoring (on the data center side) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling to manage temperature and humidity on data center floors.

The management tools used today are already a hodgepodge of DIY and third-party solutions. The DCIM solution Furlong hopes will emerge from the current effort will establish a line of communication between management tools on the server side and management tools on the data center side.

Extremes don’t work for Facebook

Going all the way with a third-party DCIM solution will not be optimal for Facebook, Furlong says. Neither will be developing the entire thing in-house.

The third-party solutions on the market do not necessarily interface well with the home-grown server-data repository. “We find we have to do a lot of work on that third-party system to make it work with what we have.”

At the same time, using software-engineer hours to build a solution from the ground up does not make business sense. “Our software developers are better utilized worrying about our infrastructure and worrying about product than they are worrying about data center space.”

Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst who focuses on data center technologies at 451 Research, says that while there is not a lot of data center equipment on the market existing DCIM products do not interface with (most gear and DCIM software use open industry-standard communication protocols), it makes sense that a company like Facebook has taken the DIY route.

“In theory, you can integrate with most if not all data enter equipment,” she says. But because of the level of customization in Facebook’s data centers, the integration may be harder in practice.

“Even though an open DCIM software or platform can be based on standards, not everything in the data center itself – chances are – is standard.”

Not a big threat to DCIM vendors

Facebook is not the only operator of what are often referred to as “hyper-scale” data centers that has not found a DCIM solution on the market that quite fits the bill. Microsoft has also written custom DCIM software to manage its massive global infrastructure.

Some hyper-scale operators, Ascierto says, “do use commercial DCIM products, but they only use components of them.” They may, for example, use a monitoring portion of a DCIM suite, while using their own asset-management component, she explains.

DCIM vendors should not see this trend among hyper-scale operators as a threat, however, Ascierto says. Yes, their physical footprint does represent a sizable chunk of the addressable market, but the market is so immature, and the market penetration rate of DCIM is so low, there are plenty of other operators to go after, she says.