Manage Assets in Data Centers

Data Center Asset Management

In today's economic climate, medium and small business asset management policies, particularly those of data centers, are being revised in an effort to reduce operational costs. Keeping track of server and infrastructure assets with active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags offers a promising solution. Incorporating RFID technology into their data center asset management systems allows companies to automate asset tracking, thereby lifting the burden of manual data collection and inventory-related procedures from the backs of data center personnel so that they can devote more time to ensuring that their cutomers' needs are satisfied.

Aside from saving time and reducing labor costs, the main advantage of using active RFID tags in the data center is that assets can be tracked in real-time with little or no human intervention. When servers need to be taken off the network or moved to another location, manual inventory management methods may not log these changes. Data accuracy is especially important in situations where servers are leased because when the lease is up, the company must either locate the leased servers or buy them. In addition, if the data center has a maintenance contract with a third-party provider, the data center will be obligated to pay the maintenance bill unless it can prove that the servers in question are not in use. With RFID technology, assets can be quickly and easily located when the need arises, without human intervention.

The use of passive RFID tags and barcodes, on the other hand, requires a person to be present in order to scan the tag or label. This would mean that a staff member would have to move throughout the data center and manually scan hundreds or thousands of barcoded servers. Even if the assets were equipped with passive RFID tags, staff would still be required to make the rounds because unlike active RFID tags, passive tags do not have their own power supply and must be energized by the RFID reader, which must be within a few feet of the asset to be tracked.

Active RFID tags have an on-board power supply (typically a battery), and they generate a signal that is picked up by an RFID reader. The tags can be programmed to generate a signal at set intervals without human intervention. Despite the benefits of using active RFD tags for data center asset management, these tags are larger and more expensive than the passive ones. Therefore, it can be a challenge to mount the tags in unobtrusive locations on the servers, which tend to be close together on the racks, but smaller tags can be custom-designed to fit the particular set-up of the data center.

If complete automation is not mandatory, passive RFID tags or barcodes could be used for data center asset management. This would save money in the short term because of lower installation and maintenance costs, but implementing a passive RFID or barcode system may not be able to significantly reduce the time spent tracking assets. The use of active RFID tags allows companies to "do more with less", and that is likely to be the driving force behind many organizations' decisions to upgrade their asset management systems to include active RFID technology.

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