DCIM Benefits Versus Direct, Indirect, and Hidden Costs

Data centers. You have to keep them managed for the sake of innovation, efficiency, and cost. As a result, you may be considering DCIM solutions to assist your companies’ short and long-term goals.

What is DCIM? Simply defined, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) is a comprehensive workflow manager that functions as a strategic business management solution for the data center.

It might seem like DCIM can have substantial cost, but the cost of not knowing your data center is higher. As you take a closer look, you’ll find that DCIM solution benefits far outweigh the direct, indirect, and hidden costs.

DCIM Benefits

Many find that the biggest value add of a DCIM solution, such as Nlyte Software, is the ability for information to be accessed and then strategically acted upon for improved efficiency, policy compliance, and reduced environmental and financial cost.

Yet DCIM solutions have a myriad of additional benefits:

• Project time savings
• Greater reporting accuracy
• Innovative development of the computing load
• Reduced power consumption through optimization identification
• Detailed computing infrastructure information

Research has even found that outage rates are significantly lower (by as much as almost 50%) for data centers which implement a DCIM solution as compared to those not utilizing such management means. The recovery time for data centers, after experiencing outages, which implement DCIM solutions has also been found to be ten times faster.

With such benefits, is there a catch to DCIM solutions? What are potential costs?

DCIM Direct Costs

As imagined, DCIM does have a price point that will require a direct financial investment. The cost of each DCIM software solution will vary from company to company as each seeks which solution option best caters towards their needs.

DCIM Indirect Costs

Yet, some costs of DCIM might not seem as easily found as the up-front cost. There are potential indirect costs to both your companies’ finances and time.

• The decision process: Evaluating DCIM solutions can cost your personnel valuable time in weighing the options and reaching a wise decision.
• Company vision and data strategy decisions: Depending on the internal cadences of your organization, different stakeholders can have different vision and ideas around strategic data management that can prove difficult or time-consuming to reconcile.
• User training: Company personnel will need to be trained on DCIM solution use.
• Internal project management: Once implemented, the DCIM solution upkeep will take project management time.

DCIM Hidden Costs

Some costs might seem even more hidden.

• Add-on Modules: Some companies will add fees for specific features that might not be clearly stated as gated offerings.
• Structure: Payment might be required per device, square footage, or other options, and this can impact price.
• License: Some companies might not clearly state the licensing process, whether subscription, permanent, yearly, or specified to the cloud.
• Integration: The cost of internal programmers, 3^rd party professional services, and on-going maintenance to integrate peripheral business systems can ruin the budget.

From evaluating of DCIM benefits in light of direct, indirect, and hidden costs, you can see how the infrastructure management solutions are worth your investment. As Nielsen and Bouley state: “The deployment of modern planning tools can result in hundreds of man hours saved per year and thousands of dollars saved in averted downtime costs.”

What are you waiting for? Get started with DCIM today.