To ensure data center reliability and efficiency, a provider of IT systems, services, and products turned to a data center infrastructure management solution.
As members of the global Fujitsu Group, Fujitsu in the UK and Ireland are leading providers of IT systems, services, and products. Serving both the public and private sectors, the more than 11,500 employees in these Fujitsu business units enable their customers to achieve their business objectives by taking advantage of integrated product and service portfolios that include consulting, applications, systems integration, managed services and products. To ensure that it can meet the highest availability application hosting and data center services that its customers demand, these Fujitsu business units take advantage of Aperture™ Capacity Manager and Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager.
Accurate Power Consumption Capacity Planning
Fujitsu originally approached Aperture for assistance with developing a fairer and more realistic model for charging its customers for data center and hosting services. The business units had been employing a traditional service fee model based on per-square-foot/meter, but realized that basing its service fees on the consumption of power and cooling would allow them to use a single, more accurate metric in terms of power. Fujitsu turned to Aperture Configuration Manager and Aperture Capacity Manager not only so it could accurately standardize on this more accurate metric, but to better predict its future power consumption and to assist in its capacity planning.
Aperture Capacity Manager enables the data center operations team at Fujitsu to gain valuable insight and control of the current and future usage of its data center resources, including reports on the current state and consumption trends for the infrastructure of its data center.
“We need our information to be 100 percent accurate,” says Chris Flanagan, Data Center Operations Development Manager for Fujitsu. “If one bit of information is wrong, we can’t trust any of it. Aperture Configuration Manager gives us the confidence that our data center management information is 100 percent accurate. Just as important, we now know where we are with each of our different sites.”
Aperture Capacity Manager has also significantly improved and simplified capacity planning for Fujitsu. The complexity of the tool they had been using before not only required a large team of people to manage it, but that tool only allowed one person to access the data at a time. Aperture Configuration Manager not only provides concurrent access to its centralized data repository, but it simplifies capacity planning for Fujitsu with a combination of summary and in-depth reporting. It provides a dashboard view into infrastructure capacities, detailing current capacity of data center resources across all data centers, as well as utilizing Aperture Capacity Manager for fine-grained trend reports for key data center metrics, including used floor area, rack space, copper or fiber ports, power, kilowatts per rack and specific kilowatt areas.
“Not only has Aperture given us better visibility of power use, but it has made it easier for our customers to do business with us,” Flanagan says. “Aperture Capacity Manager has allowed us to streamline our processes in a way that lets our data center team more accurately anticipate customers’ expansion needs.”
The Fujitsu business units have also been able to use the data outputs from Aperture Configuration Manager as part of a Data Center Energy Efficiency Program. As part of this program, Fujitsu used these Aperture data outputs in conjunction with a tool that Fujitsu internally developed to assist with equipment placement and energy efficiency. As an end result, Fujitsu saved more than 2700 metrictons of carbon per year.
Optimal Process Management
To enable Fujitsu business units to better optimize their physical infrastructure assets, they decided to also implement Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager for full end-to-end data center service management. Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager revolutionizes how companies like Fujitsu manage their data center environment.
It provides a platform for precise and consistent execution of best practice processes and a framework for continuous improvement. Its standardized methods improve predictability while reducing errors and costs with best-practice applications that incorporate all groups and disciplines within a data center, including server, storage, power, space management, facilities and IT application owners.
By simply using the standardized installation move and change process provided by Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager, Fujitsu saved 380 man hours per month.
“The risk of a bad install has definitely gone down since we’ve started using Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager,” Flanagan says. “It saves us a lot of time because people don’t have to redo things and fix errors.”
Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager has also helped the Fujitsu business units to increase overall reliability and availability of their data center systems, enabling them to immediately understand the impact of any failure and recover more quickly.
“It doesn’t happen often, but if a server fails, we need to respond immediately,” Flanagan says. “Aperture lets us point straight to the asset and pinpoint the problem. It lets us know about any vulnerability that can help with the diagnosis.”
Aperture Configuration Manager, Aperture Capacity Manager and Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager have become integral and essential parts of Fujitsu’s managed service data center environments.
“Aperture is at the core of everything we do,” Flanagan says. “Customers typically come to us because they want efficient, flexible and low cost data center services that provide the security and resilience they need.
The tandem of Aperture Capacity Manager and Aperture Infrastructure Process Manager enables us to deliver on that need.”
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