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Schneider Electric last Thursday introduced StruxureWare Operations 7.0, an enterprise data center infrastructure management software platform that enhances the visibility and control over data center operations.

Deployable on both physical and virtual servers, StruxureWare for Data Centers is a combined set of software tools of Schneider Electric’s Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and Data Center Facility Management (DCFM), which are used to manage both the facilities and the physical infrastructure of a data center 

Functionalities of StruxureWare Operations 7.0 include data gathering, monitoring, automation, and planning and implementation. Together they perform duties such as alarming, data collection, planning, optimizing, and analytics.

StruxureWare Operations 7.0 replaces its older version 6.2, and forms part of Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare for Data Centers Suite.

New features include the functionality to “drill down” into any data center location globally and get detailed real-time capacity and alarm summaries for any specific location within the data center (pictured above).

StruxureWare Operations 7.0 also boasts to provide an instant 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) airflow view of any data center design, which enables users to quickly identify hotspots and resolve thermal issues.

The VIZOR module of StruxureWare Operations 7.0 can run on Apple iPhone, iPad or Android-based smart phones, which provide the key data center capacity parameters and utilization for power, cooling, space and network.

“DCIM helps users to make of use of their computing resources more efficiently. It helps to identify redundant computing resources -- unused or under-utilized -- so users can repurpose them,” said Gay Chi Sen, director of data center software, Schneider Electric Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China.

While companies are struggling to offload IT assets from their balance sheets, they often have trouble identifying which assets to remove. “As an example, one of Schneider Electric’s customers used to have a set of servers that has been running for 10 years in their data center. But when they were asked what applications were running on it, they had no answer. And yet nobody dared to touch those servers, because they believed somewhere in the organization, somebody was accessing them,” Gay said.

In data centers, idled computing resources such as these consume electricity as the hard disks continue to spin. With DCIM, data center managers and facility managers can spot idled resources more easily, which can then be removed or repurposed.

The use of DCIM is expected to provide better insights into energy usage in cloud computing environments.

In a cloud computing environment, workloads are shifted dynamically between data centers. This creates complexities in terms of power and cooling.

Gay said: “In a cloud environment where applications run around, one set of servers can be very busy today, but tomorrow it can be left idled. And yet, idled servers still require power and cooling to run. As the workloads become dynamic, you also need to constantly make sure both power and cooling are also dynamic -- they need to follow where the servers are busy.”

In Asia, places like Hong Kong and Singapore are challenged by space constraints. The use of DCIM can help businesses make informed decisions as they stack their servers upwards, while meeting the maximum floor weight requirements.

As an example, one Schneider Electric customer in Hong Kong has built its data center in an old building, but are advised by their mechanical consultants not to accommodate more than 300 kilograms on every rack -- just 30% of the standard floor bearing weight of one ton.

“If this customer overloaded their server racks, the floor might sink and this is no good for safety. Using DCIM, data center managers can be alerted once weight limits are exceeded. Otherwise, the engineers might have installed the servers wherever space allows, without realizing they have exceeded the weight limit,” Gay said.