Infrastructure Management
Cabinets represent one of the most commonly replicated containers within the data center - it is the mechanism by which you move from a 2D world of the floor plan to a 3D world to describe the vertical element. The industry standard unit of measurement is the Rack Unit (RU), and is approximately 1.75".
The Edit Cabinets button will take you to the Cabinet Manager screen (seen below), which should not be confused with the Cabinet Navigator screen. The Cabinet Manager is strictly for defining the container, while the Cabinet Navigator is for working with devices within that container.
The data for describing cabinets is stored within the fac_Cabinet table of the MySQL database. It references foreign keys of DataCenterID->fac_DataCenter.DataCenterID and AssignedTo->fac_Department.DepartmentID (though if left blank, it is assigned as General Use). The CabinetID is referenced as a foreign key from fac_PowerDistribution and fac_Device.
Note: Not all database fields are managed within the Cabinet Manager screen. Some are updated through the Coordinate Mapper.
- '''CabinetID** - Displayed to the user in the picklist as the value of the Location field, this is a unique key assigned automatically by MySQL. It is referenced as a foreign key by fac_PowerDistribution and fac_Device.
- '''DataCenterID** - The user picklist will show the name of the data center, but the database field stores the foreign key DataCenterID.
- '''Location** - The name for this cabinet. It is highly suggested that a grid system be used to denote cabinets (typically the front left edge designates the naming). Naming your cabinets Infra-1, Infra-2, Infra-3 isn't intuitive and can become very difficult to scale.
- '''AssignedTo** - If this cabinet is reserved for the use of a single customer, you can assign it to them. This is useful if you are billing for your services and need to attach entire cabinets to a single department. If it is a general population cabinet, the value stored in the database can either be null or 0. If assigned, it must match up as a foreign key to fac_Department.DepartmentID.
- ZoneID - Not currently implemented. Reserved for future use.
- CabinetHeight - The height of the cabinet, in RU. The most common in use today seems to be 42U and fits through most doors.
- Model - A freeform field for entering the model number of the cabinet.
- MaxKW - The maximum KW supported in this cabinet. Currently you need to account for any redundancy requirements, but in future versions this should be handled via a cabinet level configuration item.
- RedundantPower - Not currently implemented. Reserved for future use.
- MaxWeight - The maximum weight supported in this cabinet. '''Be sure to check the maximum weight that your floor can support in this footprint, not just what the cabinet can support!'''
- InstallationDate - The date that you commissioned this cabinet for use.
- MapX1 - Picked from the Coordinate Mapper screen
- MapX2 - Picked from the Coordinate Mapper screen
- MapY1 - Picked from the Coordinate Mapper screen
- MapY2 - Picked from the Coordinate Mapper screen
- TempSensorIP (Added in v2.0) - The IP address of an SNMP temperature sensor for this cabinet
- TempSensorOID (Added in v2.0) - The SNMP OID for the temperature reading (in 1/10 degree increments) on the sensor defined above
- TempSensorCommunity (Added in v2.0) - The SNMP Community for the SNMP sensor defined above
Creating a Data Center is not the first step! If you have not been following the wiki topics from the top down, then you have skipped over some items that could be a dependency. Sure, you can enter your Data Center first, but you will still need to go back and enter information like Departments and People.
A Data Center can be organized in many different ways. You can think of it as a conceptual container, or a physical room, or even a subsection of your overall facility.
This methodology is most useful for someone that has to manage a large number of "closets" or other small rooms, and doesn't want to have to create a separate data center for each. As long as you come up with a unique naming scheme for each of your cabinets, there's no reason that they can't all roll up into a single defined Data Center, especially if you are using minimal features of openDCIM. If you decide to start out this way, you can also change which data center each cabinet is attached to, so it's possible to change your methodology mid-stream without having to enter everything back in.
This methodology seems to work best if you plan to utilize all of the features of openDCIM - especially the mapping overlay and the power panel reporting. These are optional features, but also some of the most useful. Simply create a data center for each physical room that you have, and when you begin adding cabinets, assign them to the appropriate data center.
This works similarly to the Conceptual Container methodology, except you are taking a HUGE room and breaking it down into smaller sections, rather than taking small rooms and grouping them logically as a single data center. The reason for doing this is strictly based upon preference, and driven mostly by the map overlay. At the developer site, the data centers are 20,000 SF of contiguous space, but when you try to map out that large of a space onto the web page, the cabinets are too small to really see any information, so it was split into smaller pieces that aligned logically with the equipment in the space.
The easiest and most intuitive way to navigate the system is to utilize a floor plan of your data center. openDCIM will not generate a floor plan for you, but can easily import floor plans that you have made already.
The overlay libraries should work just fine with:
- PNG
- JPG
- GIF
- BMP
It is highly discouraged to use BMP, though, since the file sizes are so large.
You will need to upload your floorplan file to the drawings folder. Click on Infrastructure management -> Facilities Image Management then upload to the Infrastructure Drawings section.
The floor plan is selected in the data center editing page. Simply enter the file name of the floor plan that you uploaded to the infrastructure drawings.
You do not want to use a lot of dark colors in your floor plan, because openDCIM will overlay other colors on top of it. It does this with a semi-transparent block, so the blending of colors can certainly make things look a bit off. Typically I leave the floor tiles as black and white, the cabinets as a light grey, and only add color to infrastructure items that won't be mapped, such as air handlers, power panels, perforated tiles, and UPS's.
CAD Drawings of your data center can often times be too busy to work effectively. All of the floor plans used by the developers are made with Visio and simply exported to a PNG file format. The sample floor plan that you see on the demo installation was made in Visio.
Drawings scaled to 800 pixels wide seem to work the best in terms of readability, but your web browser will automatically scale other sizes as well.
As stated, the floor plan is used to navigate to specific cabinets. This is done by mapping out the coordinates of each cabinet. When you are viewing a cabinet (selected via the Sidebar tree, since you don't have the coordinates mapped out, yet!), there is a button on the right hand side to '''Map Coordinates'''. If you click that button, you will get a mapping selector, as shown in the diagram to the left. Simply draw a rectangle around the region that you want to make clickable for the currently selected cabinet.
In addition to using the coordinates for creating clickable regions, the map will display the color coordinated metrics (red/yellow/green by default) at each defined region that represent capacity. There are buttons at the top right of the map that let you select viewing a single capacity metric, or a composite of all of them.
The Data Center logical container information is stored in the database table fac_DataCenter, and does not reference any foreign keys. The DataCenterID field, however, is a foreign key referenced by power panels and cabinets.
- DataCenterID - Mainly invisible to the user, but is an auto_increment field in the MySQL database that ensures a unique key to reference each data center
- Name - The name that you would like to display on reports, and in any pick lists within the application
- SquareFootage - The number of square feet in the data center, used to calculate metrics such as W/SF.
- DeliveryAddress - Optional, but used to indicate the physical address of a data center
- Administrator - The data center manager for this particular space, and completely optional
- DrawingFileName - Shown as 'Drawing URL' in the entry screen, this is the name of the file uploaded to the '''drawings/''' folder (relative to the web root) which houses a map of the data center. More details are available in the FloorPlan section.
- EntryLogging - A field used to identify a data center for visitor logging, which is a module developed at Vanderbilt University and not currently available as part of openDCIM.