The good news for CIOs is that a growing amount of vendor investment has been drawn to this market, which Gartner has named Data Center Infrastructure Management. nlyte software, for example, provides a modeling, monitoring, and management suite for understanding power and cooling in a data center and optimizing placement and configuration of racks and servers.

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Fully mature Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software along with energy market integration that has a detailed model of power consumption, cooling, and the ability to manage servers, turning them on or off or putting them in a lower power state, completes the picture and enables the full benefit of a software defined data center to be realized.

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First, HDS has what it calls an Infrastructure Cloud, which serves as a platform for data center convergence, including integrated data management.

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