Redundant DCIM: Building Resilience in Your Data Center Infrastructure Management Solution

Importance of Redundancy in DCIM

In the world of data centers, redundancy in Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions is crucial. It forms the backbone of a resilient data center, ensuring that operations continue smoothly even when unexpected issues arise. But is your DCIM solution truly redundant? Can it ensure failover at every level?

Despite meticulous planning, “stuff happens.” Disasters like database corruption, network outages, or cascade power failures can’t always be prevented. However, redundancy can protect the DCIM solution itself, ensuring that your data center can remain operational even in the face of these challenges.

Vulnerabilities in DCIM Solutions

• Failure at the Core: When the primary DCIM application goes offline, event handling, data recording, and alarm notifications halt, putting operations at risk. This core failure can disrupt the entire data center’s functionality.
• Failure at the Database (DB): Database corruption or outages due to storage failures, such as a SAN failure, can paralyze critical data access. Without access to vital data, managing the data center becomes nearly impossible.
• Failure in Data Collection: Real-time data flow from devices to the DCIM solution can be interrupted if the collection mechanism isn’t redundant. This interruption can lead to gaps in monitoring and delayed responses to issues.
• Network Failures: Fiber line disruptions or broader connectivity issues can isolate the DCIM system, cutting it off from critical infrastructure data. This isolation can prevent timely interventions and escalate minor issues into major problems.

Building Redundancy Across DCIM

Database Redundancy

To ensure continuous data availability, leverage databases that support clustering, log shipping, or mirroring. Backups alone are not enough as they don’t provide minute-by-minute protection or real-time alarm continuity. Microsoft® SQL Server® has scalable redundancy features, including geographically distributed clustering, making it particularly effective.

Redundant Application Architecture

The DCIM application should at minimum support a cold standby failover capability, where a secondary system is maintained in a ready-to-activate state. In the event of a primary system failure, the standby system can be manually or automatically brought online to minimize downtime. Event handling and alarm processing must resume promptly to ensure continuity and mitigate disruptions.

Redundant Data Collection

Implement a cold standby mechanism for real-time data collection to ensure device information and alarms can be resumed in the event of a collector failure. The standby collector system should be kept in a ready-to-activate state and promptly brought online if the primary collector becomes unavailable. Fallback processes should be designed to restore normal operations after the primary system is recovered.

Geographic Redundancy

Distributing components across multiple sites or regions is widely considered a best practice. Geo-distributed redundancy protects against localized disasters, such as natural disasters or regional outages. Additionally, maintaining geo-diverse backups ensures critical data is securely stored in separate locations, providing an extra layer of protection and enabling recovery even if primary and secondary sites are compromised.

How OpenData® Implements Redundancy

Application-Level Redundancy

OpenData Enterprise Edition (ODEE) supports a cold standby configuration, where a secondary application instance is maintained in a ready-to-activate state. In the event of a failure in the primary instance, the standby instance can be manually or automatically brought online, connecting to the same database and resuming operations. This ensures continuity in data collection, alerts, and notifications while simplifying system management compared to running multiple active instances in parallel.

Collector Failover and Fallback

Collectors can be configured to report to multiple ODEE servers, typically a primary server and a cold standby server. In the event of a failure on the primary server, the collectors can be redirected to the standby server to maintain the flow of data and event processing. Once the primary server is restored, collectors can be reconfigured to resume reporting to it.

Database Clustering with MS SQL Server

OpenData leverages Microsoft SQL Server’s robust clustering and geo-distribution capabilities. Options like database clustering or log shipping ensure near real-time data replication, minimizing data loss to 15 minutes or less.

Scalable and Modular Design

OpenData has a distributed architecture that ensures that redundancy can be applied selectively to key components such as the database, event manager, or collectors.

Balancing Complexity, Cost, and Resiliency

Cost vs. Complexity Trade-offs

Balancing the additional cost of redundancy with the critical need for uninterrupted operations is essential. Redundancy doesn’t have to be “all or nothing.” OpenData is modular, allowing for tailored redundancy based on specific needs.

Redundancy as an Option

Redundancy can be a flexible choice, depending on organizational priorities and budgets. With OpenData, you can apply redundancy selectively (e.g., database-only or full-stack redundancy) provides the flexibility to choose what works best.

Why Redundancy is Essential for DCIM

• Mitigating the Unknown: Unforeseen failures—hardware faults, human errors, natural disasters—are inevitable, making redundancy a necessity, not a luxury. Redundancy helps mitigate these unknowns, ensuring that your DCIM solution remains operational.
• Protecting the Protectors: DCIM solutions are designed to provide the necessary visibility needed to prevent failures in infrastructure. Ironically, those very failures can jeopardize DCIM itself without redundancy. Ensuring redundancy protects the protectors, maintaining the integrity of your data center management.
• Customer-Centric Operations: Redundancy in DCIM minimizes disruptions to business-critical operations, ensuring customer satisfaction and trust. By maintaining continuous operations, you can provide reliable services.

Assessing your DCIM solutions for redundancy is crucial for maintaining a resilient data center and preparing for “what if” scenarios. Resilience isn’t just about recovering from failures but preventing them from becoming business disruptions. OpenData provides robust redundancy options tailored to any scale or budget, enabling organizations to achieve a new standard of reliability and peace of mind. By implementing these strategies, data center operators can ensure continuous operations, even in the face of unexpected challenges.

Discover Modius OpenData Today!

Explore how OpenData can be your reliable partner for ensuring DCIM redundancy. Download the Product Brief for OpenData here and take the first step toward a more efficient, reliable, and future-ready Data Center Infrastructure Management solution.

We are passionate about empowering our clients to run more profitable data centers while providing unmatched visibility into operational data. Modius has been delivering DCIM solutions since 2007 and is based in San Francisco and proudly certified as a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB). Contact us at sales@modius.com or (888) 323.0066 to learn more