Raritan and Shands HealthCare to Speak on DCIM Trends and Minimizing the Hidden Costs of Managing IT Racks

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Feb 04, 2013, 11:16 ET

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Raritan and Shands HealthCare will be speaking on the latest trends in data center infrastructure management (DCIM) at the Teladata Technology Convergence Conference this week.

Worldwide demand for data center hosted applications is increasing dramatically. This trend, combined with the economic benefits of consolidating physical assets and introducing new more powerful hardware devices, has led to an unprecedented increase in the complexity of managing a data center of any size.

"Data Center managers are in desperate need of an 'easy-to-use solution' to improve people efficiency and extend the useful life of their existing physical infrastructure," says James Cerwinski, Senior Product Manager at Raritan. "Using spreadsheets has been an accepted way to track assets, but now forward-looking companies, such as Shands HealthCare, are deploying DCIM solutions that track assets with the added coordination and validation of managing space, power, connections and cooling. DCIM improves people efficiency by automating manual and time-consuming processes, eliminating the need to manually query available resources for every deployment and eliminating the manual effort to trace and troubleshoot circuits for each incident."

Raritan's presentation at Teladata will explore how smart racks -- instrumented with Raritan's products to monitor energy, temperature and adds/moves/changes -- minimize the hidden costs of managing data centers.

Shands, a premier health system provider in Florida, will share how Raritan's dcTrack® DCIM software is helping to manage IT assets across multiple data centers, while creating greater energy efficiency, and gaining greater operational agility and reliability.

Recognized as a top DCIM solution, dcTrack helps data centers clearly visualize infrastructure resources, keep accurate track of data center assets, improve asset "change, move and add" processes, and find infrastructure capacity to expand the life of a data center.

In addition to dcTrack, Raritan also will be showing other smart solutions in Booth # 109, including PowerIQ® energy management software, intelligent rack PDUs (iPDUs), smart electronic asset-tracking solution and other solutions designed to help manage data centers resources efficiently and smartly.

"How Shands HealthCare Saved 50 percent in Asset Tracking Efficiency" will be presented by Joseph Keena, Manager of Data Center Operations, and Robin Stringfellow, Senior Data Center Analyst, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, on Thursday, February 7, at 2:35 pm (Track A/General Session Room).

The traditional method of tracking IT assets, using Excel spreadsheets and Visio floor plans and vertical layouts, was not flexible enough to support Shands' multiple data centers. The healthcare provider wanted a better way to track data center assets, specifically identifying the exact location of every server, UPS, and device within its data centers. Attendees will learn how Shands selected and implemented Raritan's DCIM solution and how the solution would help them meet their initial goals of accurately identifying assets and capacity and improving energy efficiency, as well as how the solution can be extended to meet their future goals.

"Minimizing the Hidden Costs of Managing IT Racks" will be presented by Jawahar Swaminathan, Raritan's Director of Energy Management Solutions, on Thursday, February 7, at 1 pm (Track B/Breakout Room B).

You've built out your data center, installed cooling systems, run power feeds and filled your racks with IT equipment. But have you thought about the ongoing costs of managing or upgrading those racks? What about the costs to configure your iPDUs? How about the costs associated with Ethernet drops? Join Raritan in a discussion about how, with the right planning and solutions, you can minimize the many hidden costs.

About Raritan (Raritan.com)
Raritan is a proven innovator of energy and infrastructure management solutions for data centers of all sizes. In more than 50,000 locations worldwide, Raritan's award-winning hardware and software solutions -- including intelligent rack PDUs; DCIM software; energy management software; KVM-over-IP and Serial-over-IP access and control products -- provide IT and facility directors, managers and administrators with the control they need to increase power management efficiency, improve data center productivity and enhance branch office operations. Based in Somerset, N.J., Raritan has offices worldwide serving customers in 76 countries. Visit us at Raritan.com or follow us on the Raritan blog.

Raritan is an active member of the Green Grid, Climate Savers Computing Initiative, and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design associations. The company has been recognized by the EPA for its contribution to the agency's data center initiative.
Raritan was named a Gartner 2012 "Cool DCIM Vendor; a "major DCIM player worldwide" by IDC, "Strong Value DCIM Vendor" by EMA and, was the recipient of Frost & Sullivan's "New Product Innovation Award, North America" for Raritan's Intelligent Asset Management solution. Raritan asset management solutions also have been featured in 451 Research's Report.