Our 500-server data center is growing quickly and my manager has started investigating using a specialized Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) package to help manage constraints.
DCIM software aims to do everything: capacity planning, asset, config, change management, power & cooling monitoring, network monitoring and alarms. Some of the products she is looking at are dcTrack, DSView & nlyte. They are all proprietary and (IMO overly) expensive. Has anyone had experience with these types of systems?
We currently use Nagios, Cacti & RANCID extensively. We need to improve asset management including tracking cabling – the other DCIM feature my manager is sold on is being able to model power & cooling requirements by dragging servers between racks.
My position is that we are most of the way there with the tools we have and DCIM with all its bells & whistles is not good value, and will force us into inflexible practices that aren't necessarily best for us – not to mention vendor lock-in.
So what other practices, processes and OSS tools can you suggest to help manage a growing small-mid size data center?
Best Answer
Try adding racktables to your current suite of software to see if that gets you where you need to go. They have a nice demo setup you can play with. While not drag and drop per se, it does help you visualize the racks and Us of rack space to understand how things are physically configured.