Sunbird DCIM

Easy to Configure, Great Customer Support.

The Map configuration is a little difficult to achieve out of the box

The Visualization of my datacenter floor. i find myself in it all day going cabinet to cabinet. This portion of the tool gives you 3d CAD rendering of your datacenter that you can quickly click on a cabinet and take you to the device you are looking for. This feature also is very useful is seeing cabinet temps, power usage when paired with smart PDU's oh and one of my all time favorite features in this Visualization feature is the ability to measure out cable. You can click on measure in the menu and then click a point on your datacenter map then trace out where your cable will run and go point to point. It gives you an accurate distance so you know which cable lengths you will be using. Just one of the many various useful elements of dcTrack.

I do not have many issues or complaints with regard to dcTrack. The issues I do come across tend to be buggy new release issues that once called into the Sunbird Support Team, it's handled and rectified quickly. For example there was an issue with having to load up Adobe Flash when opening a certain tab in the software. The issue was isolated to this one tab and only when using Chrome did it come up. The Sunbird team was quick to correct this and on the next software update release, it was addressed.

Import / export functionality along with the sort and filter. When setting up the power infrastructure, I like that it is a physical representation of the plugs to outlet in that a L22-30P needs to be plugged into an L22-30R and that the software understands that a different plug or receptacle wouldn't physically plug in. There are numerous checks and balances like this that are helpful.

The separation of features between the web client and classic view. It can also be confusing to understand what features are in PowerIQ opposed to DcTrack. Making them better integrated would be helpful. It would be nice if the models library updates were more proactive vs reactive. For example, when Dell released their Rx30 lineup, it would be nice to have the R330, R430, R530, etc.. automatically added without having to put in a request since Dell is such a big player in this field. I understand it can't be done for every make / model but for the big manufacturers core lineup that would help. Software doesn't natively work with Chrome, the use of extensions doesn't always work properly.

dcTrack is easy to use in that setting it up to model a data center follows the physical process of actually setting up a data center. Using it to maintain documentation of assets' placement, data and power connections is easy and logical. It also provides for great monitoring of power utilization and temperature/humidity with its integration with Power IQ. And the customer support is excellent! You are treated like a partner.

dcTrack is mostly web-based but part of the functionality remains in an application called Classic View. This functionality is being migrated piece by piece, and a lot of it is accessible now from the web client. We look forward to the day when we no longer need to use Classic View as it is quite slow and it cannot be re-sized to see all of it at once without scrolling.