Avocent Case Study
Data Domain
Optimized Data Center Improvement with the Avocent
Profile
Company
Data Domain
Management Suite
Business Benefits
• Enables data center personnel to easily manage vast numbers of data center assets
• Provides visual modeling, delivering real-time information, enabling managers to
quickly perform daily maintenance tasks
• Enables the recovery of unused or underused space in the data center
Location
United States
Industry
Technology
Web site
Data Domain is in the business of helping organizations make the most efficient use
of their growing data storage resources. As the leading provider of data deduplication technology, this Santa Clara, California company helps its customers reduce or
eliminate the use of costly tape infrastructures.
With more than 900 employees and operations worldwide, Data Domain has grown
into one of the leading providers of storage technology. The company was acquired
by storage vendor EMC Corp. in 2009.
Businesses are deploying Data Domain’s deduplication storage products as a solution for backup and disaster recovery and also as a storage tier for long-term retention of enterprise data for reference, litigation support and regulatory compliance.
New and more efficient ways to serve the storage needs of customers are constantly
evolving, and a key to effectively serving the market is maintaining a strong researchand-development (R&D) operation.
Data Domain supports its R&D efforts through a large data center in Santa Clara
and is relying on new technology from Avocent—a leading provider of IT infrastructure
management solutions—to help the company improve the efficiency of its data center;
more effectively provide its engineers with the server capacity they need when they
need it; and, at the same time, help the company save time, manpower and money.
www.datadomain.com
Solution
Avocent MergePoint® Infrastructure
Explorer Software
“It’s my desire to deploy this
tool [Avocent MergePoint
Infrastructure Explorer] to
all the R&D data centers,
simply because it would
make it a lot easier to know
at-a-glance what assets are
available to the division.”
Visual tool was key for managers
In 2008, Data Domain executives determined that the company needed a more effective way to manage components, including some 2,000 servers, in its data center, says
Peter Jackson, manager of the R&D labs and data center.
“Because it’s an R&D data center, we have a lot of churn in terms of where things are
physically located—at least compared to an IT infrastructure that’s a set-and-forget
environment,” Jackson says.
The company had been using an internal tool to track where servers were located, but
the process did not use a graphical format.
“It was laid out in a geographical, numeric, location-type of matrix, which is very difficult
to parse manually,” Jackson says.
Planning moves or relocations, or figuring out what would result from those changes,
was a challenge. Managers often had to manually draw up new configurations, hold
Peter Jackson
R&D Labs and Data Center Manager
Data Domain
[Avocent Case Study] Data Domain
lengthy discussions and then convey the information about changes to
other management and executive staff.
ture Explorer, Data Domain saved nearly $400,000 in one quarter by
recovering unused rack space in the data center.
Jackson decided that the R&D data center needed some sort of
visual tool that would simplify and improve the process. He and his
colleagues initially considered designing and implementing a visual
planning tool internally, using the company’s offshore development
team to build a visual reference onto Data Domain’s existing matrix.
But this would have been prohibitively expensive—about three times
the cost of using a commercial offering, Jackson estimates. He and his
team evaluated product offerings from multiple vendors and selected
Avocent’s MergePoint® Infrastructure Explorer, a software suite that
provides data center managers the information they need in order to
make decisions about the data center.
Return on investment can be measured by the immediate reduction
in resource costs due to the more efficient process of moving servers
in the data center. The company also hopes to reduce energy costs.
Data Domain can use the Avocent tool to help spread out components that use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat in order to
help avoid hot spots in the data center.
The platform features visual modeling, which delivers real-time information that enables managers to more effectively know, plan and manage
data center components. Visual modeling provides a graphical view
of a data center’s racks and the individual IT assets within a rack. The
visual information helps managers perform daily maintenance activities
and cuts the time it takes to respond to issues and plan changes.
Unused rack space recovered equals savings
The Avocent platform gives Data Domain the ability to better visualize its data center footprint and to make plans for how it can recover
space that isn’t being used or isn’t being used optimally, Jackson says.
“When I say recover, I’m talking about space, power and cooling.
These are all very expensive assets,” he says.
Being able to visually analyze data center assets has given Data
Domain the ability to make better use of data center space, Jackson
explains. Managers can now see where problems are and figure out
how to resolve them.
The tool also helps enable collaboration. Anytime servers are moved
within the data center, all interested parties in the company need to
be informed of how and why the server is being relocated, Jackson
says. MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer has made it easier for managers to present this information to those interested parties.
The technology provides a far more effective way of planning data center
configuration and use than Data Domain’s previous, non-visual method.
“When you have a matrix based on a bunch of numerical data about
where things are positioned, you can’t see that you have empty U
[rack unit] space,” Jackson says. “It’s not obvious. This tool actually
points out where you have used and unused U space.”
The technology has led to tangible gains such as savings in manpower and costs. For example, as a result of using MergePoint Infrastruc-
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Platform expansion planned
One of the advantages of the tool is that it’s very intuitive, Jackson
says. Avocent “put a lot of effort into making sure that it is fairly easy
to use,” he says. That enables even casual users of the application,
such as engineers who are looking to find a particular server, to take
advantage of its capabilities.
About 300 Data Domain engineers are using the tool to find servers in
the data center.
“Engineers basically jump around from server to server, depending
on what they’re working on,” Jackson says. “When they get on a new
server, they might need to know where it is physically, so they use this
tool for that purpose.”
Jackson says it was important that the initial configuration of the tool,
such as setting maximum power thresholds for the data center or
racks, be done carefully and at the beginning of the implementation.
“It’s not that you can’t do it later. It’s just that getting that right at the beginning makes the information a lot more useful going forward,” he says.
The long-term plan is to link other Data Domain tools into MergePoint
Infrastructure Explorer for additional benefits.
“We’re actually developing a communication plug-in for our own inventory control tool, where we keep a lot of the same information that
MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer has,” Jackson says. “We’ll synchronize the Avocent tool and our tool together. Right now we’re putting
information in two different places every time we change a location or
install a new server.”
MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer includes an API feature that enables this type of integration.
Following Data Domain’s acquisition by EMC, Jackson’s counterparts
in other business units of the organization have contacted him to ask
about the management tools he is using, because they’ve heard about
their success at the R&D data center.