Seeing Is Believing in Data Centers

Visual Data Center (VDC) is the primary software product and trade name of Optimum Path Systems of Tampa, Florida. The company produces 3D visualization Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, which provides a complete picture of data center operations. Intel Data Center Manager (DCM), plays an integral role in augmenting VDC’s data center picture with power consumption and temperature information.

About Visual Data Center

Optimum Path Systems was founded in 1999 by Jim Yuan. The company mainly created custom software for large telecom carriers, performing functions such as billing, provisioning and messaging. According to Steven Webel, COO, in 2007, a client asked Optimum Path for a floor plan of its data center.

“They wanted to point and click on a device and see documentation and a couple of data points of monitored data,” Webel says. “So we finished that project and we thought, ‘there some more things we could do with this.’” The company began exploring the facilities and IT monitoring markets and saw many gaps. VDC was created and released and has now become the company’s primary product and trade name.

The VDC approach is simple but effective. Using existing data protocols, such as IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) and SNMP (Secure Network Management Protocol), VDC collects information from the water towers and air conditioners on top of the building all the way down to the chip level, Webel says.

“All of these devices in the middle primarily support a few common languages, so we can very quickly get from 90 to 95 percent coverage of the devices,” Webel explains. “Because we’re software people, we built VDC modularly, with an open architecture, so it’s easy for us to add a plug-in to talk to something we don’t natively talk to.”
The result is a hardware-agnostic solution that shows a single view of both static equipment status (warranty information, location, service history, etc.) and activity (CPU utilization, power consumption, temperature, etc.) in 3D, and, more recently, delivered on mobile devices as well. Although it was always possible to obtain energy information from devices, either through instrumented power strips, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), or through IPMI, VDC had to do a considerable amount of footwork to incorporate this data from numerous sources. Additionally, many devices communicate average power consumption and temperature readings at the rack or power-strip level rather than by individual server air inlets or AC plugs.

To close the gap, VDC began working with Intel DCM middleware to collect critical, granular server information, greatly increasing the time-to-effectiveness of the VDC solution.

The Role of Intel DCM

Intel DCM has several unique capabilities that are integral to the offerings of companies such as VDC. Critical among these are the ability to provide accurate real-time temperature and power consumption data on individual devices, and to read virtually any kind of data output from any device, and provide that in a consolidated and programmatic way for consumption by DCIM tools.

By incorporating Intel DCM middleware, VDC can now offer fine-grain energy management information from each device, essentially at the “push of a button,” Webel says.

“It’s very important to get data directly from the server, versus getting that data from a UPS device two rooms away,” says Webel. “The more granular your data collection, the more valuable and correct it is.” With Intel DCM embedded, VDC can now enhance its 3D data center picture with temperature recordings directly from the inlets (air intakes) of individual servers and show actual power consumption for each device, rather than aggregates or estimates.

Additionally, Intel DCM speeds the identification of usable protocols for data collection across a range of devices using Intel chips. Before Intel DCM became a part of its offering, VDC routinely encountered devices from manufacturers that did not have an IPMI output written into their systems’ operating protocols, necessitating custom plug-in work.

“The Intel DCM software will look for IPMI and say, ‘OK, that’s not there—here’s a WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) or interact interface,” Webel says. “It can just jump around and find all kinds of different ways to pull data. For us, that means we have a single place to go for all the server data now. I don’t have to configure 3,000 servers with monitoring. I just go to Intel DCM and they’re already collecting it—I just show it. That makes the implementation much easier on our end.”

Benefits of Embedding Intel DCM

Embedding Intel DCM middleware into its 3D visualization software has helped VDC accelerate its deployment time and added granularity to its thermal imaging maps and power consumption data. As a software-only company, VDC can develop solutions more quickly than hardware companies many times its size, which have long development cycles and closely tie their hardware to their monitoring solutions.

With Intel DCM embedded, VDC can offer a hardware-agnostic, single-window DCIM solution that can be rapidly configured and altered to each client’s needs. Webel estimates that Intel DCM covers approximately 80 percent of all devices in his data center engagements. And the coverage is increasing.

“If you have six different windows open and you’re trying to see how these things are interacting, it’s up to you to connect the dots rather than your system providing a coherent interface to all the aspects of the technology,” Webel says. The combined capabilities of data-point consolidation, protocol reconciliation, and granularity provided by Intel DCM at the device level are analogous to VDC’s offering at the level of the data center and help VDC achieve its goal of providing an end-to-end picture, an increasingly essential capability for facilities and IT managers alike.

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