A key component of today’s data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems is gathering and analyzing live data associated with the data center. This can represent thousands of points of information such as temperature, power, capacity, or status of any number of devices, meters, or sensors throughout the data center. The collected DCIM information can easily venture into the “Big Data” realm with not only collection of information, but also storage of millions of samples of historical values.
As an industry term, DCIM has been convoluted over the years as multiple vendors use the same term to define significantly different feature sets. While DCIM is taking a more defined shape, the term “real-time” in regards to data collection is in danger of falling into that same confusing realm for an enduser.