Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/734838
6 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com Naturally, then, if IT has access to a unified view of its side of the data center and facilities has access to such a view of its side, the next step would be combining these two sides into an overarching pack- age that provides monitoring, alerting, analytics and, at least in some practical cases, decision making. Bridging the gap: facilities and it e tension between facilities and IT means unifying their respective responsi- bilities into a single automation soware package involves overcoming some challenges. Although their goals aren't fundamentally different, their focuses may at least appear to be. St. Amand of Schneider Electric said, "Both IT and the facilities (which in some cases includes security) are tasked with data center uptime. IT wants to be able to provide five nines of reliability to end users, and facilities is responsible for supporting the infrastructure of the entire building. Most of the automation occurs on the facilities side, but increasingly the convergence of IT and operations technology (OT) makes both departments responsible." So, each side has a stake in the success of the other, supporting some common ground. In a sense, the goal of a unified automation package is to run the entire data center through soware. at idea brings to mind the term soware-defined data center, which is traditionally associ- ated with IT but can extend to facili- ties. "ink beyond the data center as a singular place where a company owns and manages its servers," said Shelat of HPE. "It doesn't matter where the data center is, who owns it or who manages it. What matters is that customers can run their applications and run services where they want, when they want. Data center auto- mation soware works behind the scenes to automate, monitor and optimize the infrastructure so that customers can have a seamless experience. ey need not worry about an outage, underperforming servers or disaster recovery. A 'soware- defined data center' can take care of all of this, behind the scenes." St. Amand offered a similar senti- ment: "Soware is the heart of all BMS, EPMS and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems. e inte- gration of these sometimes independent systems is becoming more of the norm to- day. Information sharing between IT and OT will run a data center more efficiently, and all three soware packages are preva- lent in today's designs. erefore, I would say the term soware-defined data center applies to both." Furthermore, he notes that solutions exist now to integrate facili- ties and IT automation. One approach to integration involves web services through the Data Center Markup Language (DCML), for example. Another involves the use of custom drivers and middleware to enable communication among the ap- plications that handle the different aspects of the facility. Unification versUs stratification In some sense, IT services rest on the foundation that the facilities depart- ment provides. is metaphor of stratifi- cation may be less accurate today than in the past, however. "e line between fa- cilities and IT is definitely becoming more blurred," said St. Amand. "e IT space doesn't exist without the support of facili- ties behind it. Without facilities working properly and maintaining the systems, IT can't function. erefore, what we are finding in the industry is that many times IT and facilities report to the same line of business, whether it be the CIO, CFO or COO." Having a common point of responsibility, then, both departments have reason to share common goals—in implementing and enabling automation, for instance. Although they will still have different areas on which they focus, lead- ing to some inevitable tensions, IT and facilities can still find common ground. Automation can be one aspect of opera- tions that helps ease the tension between two departments that have historically been at odds despite their common over- arching goal: delivering timely, quality services to customers at a profit to the company. n www.sika-usa.com 262.886.2695 Chilled Water Solutions Flow Meters Flow Switches → Protection for high-efficiency heat exchangers → Magnetic reset ensures a long product life → Long term stable and reliable function → ETL approved to UL Standards → Multiple mounting options for Cu, PVC, SS, etc. → Long term stable and reliable function → Protection for high efficiency heat exchangers → No moving parts ensure long product life → ETL approved to UL Standards → Integrated temperature sensor → Long term Stable and reliable protection Made in Germany Quality by tradition ∙