Download document () of 20
Send email
Download
You have exceeded the download limit
Established in 1877, the University of Manitoba represented the first university in western Canada and has since grown into one of the country’s top research institutions. Supporting some 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students, the university offers two main campuses in Winnipeg and more than 100 programmes across multiple faculties and schools, providing more learning, teaching and research opportunities than any other post-secondary institution in the province.
Read how the university employed Eaton’s DCIM software (also known as VCOM) to gain a comprehensive view across its entire facility, with data and metrics that have helped the institution optimise efficiency and ensure high reliability.
“VCOM has been a fantastic addition to our data centre suite of tools. The support has been great, and Eaton really helps make everything simple to set up and keep updated. The product really does speak for itself!”
VCOM’s environmental monitoring capability was the main feature that appealed to the University of Manitoba. The software allows staff members to create real-time thermal imaging profiles of the data centre environment related to temperature, humidity, leak detection, door closure and air pressure data. “We primarily monitor power, temperature and humidity”, Verreault says. “We can monitor the incoming UPS power as well as power at the rack PDU level ─ and everywhere in between.”
The University of Manitoba is also taking advantage of VCOM’s 3D rendering capabilities, which are available at all levels of the data centre as well as across the enterprise. The tool, which can incorporate power, space, environment, IT networking and virtualisation parameters, allows the university to identify potential problems in a wide array of IT assets, including physical servers, VM hosts, VM guests, switches, rack PDUs, UPSs and large facility devices.
“Currently we use it for the 3D modelling of the room and cabinets themselves”, Verreault notes, “as well as environmental aspects, including network, cabling and power. The 3D client is also great for being able to show managers and directors a 3D model of the room.”
As a result of the information gleaned through VCOM, the University of Manitoba has been able to reduce inefficiencies in cooling as well as optimise other environmental parameters. The software is not only instrumental in reducing inefficiencies in power, cooling and space, but is also especially advantageous in multi-tenant facilities as it provides views across many clients, with billing parameters for power, cooling and space.
“Temperature and humidity monitoring is displayed very well in the 3D model and makes it easy to detect warm spots in the room, which has helped us improve overall cooling efficiency."
In addition to helping reduce data centre operational expenses, improve system and application reliability, and mitigate risk through data analysis, VCOM gives users the ability to easily track usage, utilisation, capacity limits and more. In turn, the software enables data centre personnel to react quickly to potential problems through immediate and accurate location of faulty devices as well as root-cause and impact analyses.
Furthermore, through customised reporting and dashboards, data centre personnel can examine multi-level reports, role-based dashboards, KPI tracking, trending and predictive analytics. In addition, an integrated rack-building tool allows users to build each rack using a repository of more than 20,000 devices to deliver an accurate and visual display of the data centre. Furthermore, IT staff can create “what-if” scenarios to understand current usage and ensure capacity for upcoming projects.
“It’s a great tool for incorporating several monitoring methods in one place. Being able to view so many metrics with one piece of software is a great asset and the dashboards allow a less technical view for managers who just want to know that everything is running properly.”
