Confluences: IT and facilities management

I recently attended and enjoyed the DatacenterDynamics Command and Control conference in London. With increasing energy costs and growing environmental concerns optimisation of the datacentre has become topical. I gained an insight into how sophisticated facilities management (FM) in the datacentre has become. There are many technologies in the datacentre that require management: Fire detection systems, power and thermal, security, CCTV etc. Adding to this array of technology, the latest chip designs reflecting cost and environmental concerns include power and thermal monitoring and the ability to throttle back.

There appears to be general agreement that to attain an optimal datacentre requires a convergence of the FM and IT disciplines. Many believe it would be beneficial if the cost of the datacentre fell within the IT budget. IT would then be compelled to take responsibility for this aspect of IT costs. Such a convergence is challenging, since the management tools and the cultures of FM and IT are different.

The danger to avoid is creating silo’d management systems that restrict us into making isolated non-holistic decisions – that is, technology decisions without an awareness of the business services that are involved. In IT management it is now well accepted that service management rather than the traditional component management is the optimal way to manage IT systems. This service management concept needs to be applied to the management of FM technology. So for instance a decision to throttle back would be taken with full awareness of what business function the server was supporting.

Business Service Management (BSM) has proven very successful in bringing this business service perspective to IT and it would seem logical it can also accommodate FM. BSM can be envisaged as consisting of three tiers:

1) The first integrates with the existing management tools. This could easily be extending to incorporate the FM management tools.

2) The second tier models the services and once again could easily incorporate the FM components.

3) The third provides secure views tailored for different user groups and would provide personalised views for FM community user groups.

The advantage of converging the FM and IT management domains at the BSM level is you get a service perspective, making for better informed decision making, and a more common level of terminology, improving communications.

It will be interesting to see if BSM can bring these anticipated benefits of a more efficient and effective datacentre through the service perspective and the cultural alignment.

-- Jim