Presentation: The Data Center Dashboard

The Data Center Dashboard (Dashboard) is built in collaboration between Accenture and OSIsoft. The Dashboard is a real-time monitoring solution that consolidates data from different systems, both facility and IT, to allow a single comprehensive view into the data center, enabling better data center operations decisions. The tool leverages OSIsoft’s PI system as a data integrator that collects, stores and analyzes data that is available through at least one of the PI system’s built-in interfaces, including but not limited to SNMP, RDBMS, OLEDB and PI’s own Universal File Loader (UFL). Utilizing these interfaces, the PI system can integrate directly with devices, files, databases, websites, and third party products. The solution showcased is an ongoing pilot at the Accenture data center in Hof, Germany. In this deployment, the Dashboard integrates data from a weather station, a building management system, an existing power metering system within the data center, power bills, as well as metrics gathered from IT systems and devices, including server consumption and utilization levels. The Dashboard will allow data center operators to examine in real-time how power is used and allocated within different rooms and between different systems in the data center, to understand how facility set points should be modified according to outside climate conditions and other external factors, and to gain insight into methods for improving the efficiency of the facility infrastructure, ultimately decreasing data center operational costs. In addition, users will be empowered to better manage power, cooling and heating capacity and to predict future consumption and events based on analytics.