[Advertorial] All IT Rooms is one of the leading Dutch data center companies. It designs, builds and manages data centers for customers from all industries. All IT Rooms focuses on five core areas:

• Modularity: IT environments are constantly changing. It is therefore important to build the necessary flexibility into data centers.
• Capacity: Space costs money. This applies to both the construction and management of data centers. But lack of space can cost even more money. Especially when a new data center has to be built because the existing one is no longer sufficient.
• Availability: IT outages are associated with sky-high costs. They can even endanger the survival of companies. Various aspects must be taken into account as early as the planning phase in order to ensure maximum availability.
• Sustainability: It is important to design data centers to be as resource-efficient as possible. This is not only necessary in view of global warming, but also because saving energy and using sustainable components contribute to cost savings.
• Functionality: The complete structure of the data center must be adapted to the wishes and needs of the customer. This is the only way it can provide the necessary functionality.

All IT Rooms has all the necessary knowledge and experience to optimally fulfill these five core aspects as a full-service provider from planning to implementation and management of data centers. The aim is to ensure the 24/7 availability of all IT components. After all, the IT environment and the data center form the pillars of the business processes of any organization.

The starting point

A reliable and solid Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) system is a prerequisite to ensure the availability of all data centers managed by All IT Rooms. A DCIM system monitors and manages all aspects of the data center, from hardware components such as servers, switches, routers, storage systems and racks to building control systems (air conditioners, door locking systems, environmental sensors, surveillance cameras, etc.). ) and environmental metrics such as temperature and humidity. Monitoring is the most important of these activities. Because only when all aspects of the data center are monitored 24/7 is it possible to identify anomalies and errors, trace them back to the source and fix them before they become catastrophic failures. All IT Rooms uses the monitoring solution PRTG from Paessler for this.

The review

In 2017, All IT Rooms started evaluating different products that could serve as a DCIM system to manage and monitor its data centers. The requirements specification was as follows:

• Robustness and Reliability: Regardless of how technically advanced or comprehensive a DCIM solution is. If it doesn’t provide all the necessary data 24/7 and reliably, it’s not an option for All IT Rooms.
• Supporting Multiple Customers: All IT rooms needed a solution that would allow them to manage customers’ different data center locations in an integrated way. Importantly, this solution was not tied to time, place, or a specific supplier.
• Scalability: All IT Rooms’ customer base is constantly growing. That means more and more data centers to manage. The solution therefore had to be scalable in every respect.
• Analysis of the true cause of problems: It is not enough for a DCIM solution to generate a notification in the event of an error. The solution must also be able to identify and report the cause of the error in order to be able to react quickly and avoid consequential damage.

After thorough market research, All IT Rooms chose PRTG in addition to a number of established DCIM products in its evaluation round, although this solution is known in the market as a pure monitoring tool and not as DCIM software. Much to the surprise of the team All IT Rooms proved to be the easiest to implement and scalable solution for PRTG. And after extensive testing, it turned out to be the most stable solution. Since monitoring was seen as the main task of the desired solution, it was clear that PRTG had to form the basis for it.

Ronald Kok, CEO of All IT Rooms, summarizes the evaluation results as follows: “In all our tests, PRTG proved to be significantly more reliable and faster than classic DCIM solutions such as Nlyte, iTracs, Sunbird and Device42, which were also tested. We need a solution that gives us a real-time view of the status of all the data centers we monitor and doesn’t make us feel like we’re waiting minutes for each mouse click. We found this solution with PRTG.“

DCIM with PRTG

All IT Rooms has been using PRTG since 2017 as the basis for its self-developed DCIM system called All-BaaS®. PRTG takes care of monitoring all data center infrastructure components, from cooling systems to uninterruptible power supply (UPS), generators, security systems and so on. A particular focus is on monitoring energy consumption. Ever increasing energy prices and social responsibility in relation to global warming are key points for attention.

Data centers are particularly energy-intensive and are therefore monitored critically. However, saving energy is only possible if you know the exact consumption of each device and system. Monitoring energy consumption is therefore a must. But that’s not the only benefit. According to Ronald Kok, PRTG also helps to avoid wasting energy: “Temperature is one of the most important factors in a data center. Temperatures that are too high can lead to increased wear on the hardware components and even to overheating failures. And temperatures that are too low due to excessive cooling in turn lead to unnecessary energy consumption. Therefore, effective thermal management is a critical consideration in data center design. And consistent temperature monitoring with PRTG is a must once a data center is up and running. This includes not only the measurement of temperature values, but also the monitoring of air conditioning systems, doors and windows.”

All IT Rooms now manages various customer data centers with BaaS®. This system has confirmed the positive results from the evaluation and test phase in practice: “We have been using PRTG in ever larger environments for several years. And the correctness of our decision is proven again and again. PRTG proves to be the ideal solution for monitoring all the data centers that we manage and maintain on a daily basis‘ says Ronald Kok. In addition, various possibilities were discovered over the years that were not even considered when developing the solution.

Continuous Optimization

PRTG continuously provides data about the monitored data centers and stores them long-term. Analysis of this data allows incremental optimization steps on various fronts.

• Increase performance and reliability: Long-term measurements reveal weaknesses in the data center that have a lasting effect on performance and reliability. For example, excessive temperatures, low battery level or overloading of hardware components. By measuring them, continuous optimization steps are possible.
• Realize cost savings: Unnecessarily low temperatures are a sign of excessive cooling. Excessively high temperatures, in turn, increase wear on the hardware components. In extreme cases, this can lead to damage and malfunctions. Long-term monitoring helps uncover such issues and minimize resource consumption, both in terms of energy and hardware. This contributes to cost savings and benefits the environment.
• Optimize data center design Long-term monitoring with PRTG provides all IT rooms with all the data they need to continuously improve existing data centers and make new data centers even more efficient.

Ronald Kok sees clear added value for his customers: “Thanks to the historical data in PRTG, we can continuously optimize the data centers we monitor. For our customers, this means continuous improvement in cost efficiencyence and optimum reliability.“

Increased efficiency through synergy

During the cooperation between All IT Rooms and its customers, it turned out again and again that they already use PRTG to monitor their network and IT infrastructure. Ronald Kok explains how this data can be used to advantage: “With a little help from our experts, many of our customers can quickly and easily integrate data center monitoring into their existing IT monitoring processes. This gives them a comprehensive overview of the entire IT landscape, including the data center. And that makes it possible to find out the real cause of problems on all fronts and to anticipate and fix malfunctions much faster than with monitoring systems that work in silos.”

Diploma

With PRTG as the basis of its DCIM system, All IT Rooms can offer its customers significant added value. This makes their data centers more stable and efficient. Irregularities are identified immediately so they can be corrected before they become malfunctions and other serious problems. However, for Ronald Kok of All IT Rooms, the main advantage of PRTG is its stability: “Ever since we started using PRTG, our DCIM system has been 100% stable. Since 2017 we have experienced 0% downtime with PRTG. That’s great.“

By Ronald Kok, CEO of All IT Rooms

This is a commercial submission by Paessler. The publishers are not responsible for the content.