Case Study – InCommand Services

Cloudify your data center with InCommand

The Business Situation

The customer, a global semiconductor enterprise, was in escrow to construct two new data centers as they believed their primary West Coast U.S. data centers were at capacity. However, the company had not implemented Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software that could run what-if capacity planning scenarios, there was no maintenance of server asset records, and there were many single-powered servers that made it nearly impossible to understand failover requirements.

The enterprise initiated plans to construct new data centers to ensure continued capacity.

data center profile info: Power 8+MW, Racks Monitored: 1700, White Space 60,000SF, Locations 42, Continents 4

"No other solution we evaluated provided data center infrastructure management as a service, streamlined workflows, asset lifecycle management, data, and power connectivity for every device and capacity planning algorithms we required."

InCommand® Solution

Before taking on the costly expense of developing, designing, building and implementing new data centers, the client chose to deploy InCommand Managed Services to determine an accurate data center current state and gain what-if scenario capacity planning functionality. InCommand deployed a team of technicians to the two primary data centers over a period of two months to inventory 700 cabinets and 10,000 devices. Full and accurate records of devices and racks were obtained and then uploaded by the administrator to the InCommand portal.

A team compiled the data so that the make/model/owner, power, cable and spatial details were easily queried, searched and sorted, rack elevations dynamically generated and power loads and thresholds were readily viewable across the entire power chain from device to utility. The client then worked with a planner and the what-if scenario capabilities of the InCommand portal, to provide fast and accurate capacity planning to management.

"Implementing InCommand resulted in $22,000,000+ in savings, reduced turnaround times, and improved quality of service."

Results

InCommand enabled the customer to prolong the life of their two most critical data centers by three years, which allowed them to cancel escrow and save $30,000,000 in planned construction. Specifically, InCommand’s capacity planning functionality demonstrated that by refreshing compute servers greater than four years old the existing data center could service the business for another twelve months. Additionally, capacity metrics showed that annual refreshes combined with a virtualization strategy and utilizing previously hidden capacities would extend the data centers an additional two years. Beyond saving money on data center build out, InCommand asset metrics guided the customer to refresh older equipment with more competent servers, providing efficiency gains and allowing the customer to recover $750,000 in utility rebates.

Finally, InCommand’s streamlined operational workflows improved the quality of new deployments, reduced the time needed to deploy new services from weeks to days, and enabled staff repurposing. InCommand delivered deep real-time power and capacity data as well as historical reporting, which gave management the facts needed to confidently plan future expansions. Three years later the customer used InCommand’s utilization trends and operational metrics to negotiate colocation contracts at a fraction of the original new construction budget.

After initially running InCommand on its two main data centers, the client determined to deploy the service across all 42 of its facilities on four continents.