Modern IT Asset Management requires businesses to maximize the value of their assets. The Total Cost of Ownership requires an accurate assessment of the direct and indirect costs of data assets. Extending lifecycles too long can means crashes and system failures. Retiring assets early can dramatically increase capital expenditures. Business leaders must focus on reducing risk and at the same time be focused on scalable growth solutions. Asset lifecycle management is the foundation for risk management and business growth.

A recent article in Forbes states “The earlier you can identify a problem, the less money it will cost you to resolve it. Because after a major outage, there’s a ton of effort that goes into firefighting -- engineers need to get in a room, look at dashboards, dig through logs and perform root-cause analysis. It can take hours, days or even weeks to fully understand an incident and mitigate it from happening in the future, which is all productive time your engineers are losing.”

A study shared by Data Center Knowledge found most organizations are not managing these perpetual motion machines effectively. Despite best practice recommendations for 2-3 year refresh cycles, research shows that 65% of servers stay in use for 5-10 years, even though extending the replacement timeframe from just three to five years increases the failure rate by over 100% and more than doubles the cost of IT support staff labor.

The demands of modern IT Asset Management how grown past passive solutions like barcodes and spreadsheets.

Sage has recently partnered with RFCODE to provide a real time solution to IT Asset Management.

RF Code’s Asset Management solution enables IT organizations to track and manage the physical location, financial, and contractual information of enterprise-owned mobile IT assets through their life cycle. Through the integration of RF Code’s CenterScape software platform, dedicated reader infrastructure, and innovative wire-free active RFID sensors, organizations gain real-time visibility by collecting, consolidating and analyzing real-time information on virtually all of their distributed IT assets with one unified management platform.

Mobile IT Asset Management from RF Code

RF Code’s new solution for Mobile Asset Management enables IT organizations to track and manage the physical location, financial, and contractual information of enterprise-owned mobile IT assets through their life cycle. RF Code's unique active RFID wire-free sensor technology, reader infrastructure, and CenterScape software solution gives IT managers real-time visibility of mobile assets by collecting, consolidating and analyzing real-time information on virtually all of their distributed IT assets with one unified management platform.

Benefits of Real-time Mobile IT Asset Management include:

• Accurate Mobile Asset Tracking: Identify the exact physical location of your mobile assets in real-time whether they are connected to the network or not
• Efficient Lifecycle Management: Achieve better asset availability by gaining an understanding of all asset status to effectively plan purchasing, manage resources and predict future preventative maintenance
• Reduce Mobile Device Total Cost of Ownership: Maintain inventory accuracy and eliminate the need to perform full manual audit by centralizing monitoring of all on-premise mobile IT assets
• Unified ITAM: Unify processes for wide-ranging IT asset tracking across Data Center, Collocated, and Edge deployed infrastructure environments

Monitoring your assets via active RFID technology. The benefits of this technology for an accurate, real-time inventory of your data center assets:

• Visibility into all your data center assets
• Maximum return on investment by fully using all the equipment you purchase
• Audit trail of all IT equipment –know at any given time what resources are available and where they are
• Management of equipment throughout the entire lifecycle
• Compliance with industry security-related regulations
• Financial savings through avoiding over-provisioning and inefficient use of staff time

Do You Know Where Your Servers Are?

The Uptime Institute estimates that 20% of servers are obsolete, outdated, or unused, and that very few data center managers believe their facilities contain these comatose machines. In addition, many servers are not properly maintained, updated, or patched and may draw power without handling any workload – the Uptime Institute estimates that average servers operate at only 12-18% of capacity. These two stats alone mean that data centers are losing millions of dollars due to missing, inactive, or underperforming assets and that a significant number of assets are not delivering value.

What does an efficient and optimized data center look like? It’s a center that uses real-time asset management and environmental monitoring to deliver continuous and accurate information about all assets for their entire lifecycle. Managers in these data centers understand that their equipment and processes must work together to create optimal efficiency, and that they must automate processes to fully take advantage of their existing resources. They know:

• What actual assets they own – routers, servers, storage systems, security devices, power supplies, backup systems, cooling systems, cabling, etc.
• The location of assets – loading dock, storage room, rack position, repair bench, etc.
• The operational status of assets – whether they are connected to the network, secure, in use and percentage of utilization, or if they are offline for maintenance or other reasons
• The lifecycle stage of assets – knowing when an asset is nearing obsolescence and whether or not it needs to be replaced when it is retired
• Power usage and analytics
• Environmental conditions and cooling requirements

Learn more about our RFCode services for IT Asset Management.