Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and a global leader in maximizing availability, capacity and efficiency of critical infrastructure, today announced the availability of the Trellis™ Process Manager, offering data center managers an easy-to-use, automated workflow manager. The new Trellis™ module creates, tracks and provides views on data center workflow allowing organizations to improve the execution and efficiency of standard data center processes. Combined with the other modules of the complete Trellis DCIM solution, Trellis Process Manager also allows users to immediately see the impact of proposed changes on the data center, improving costs and efficiencies by enabling accurate planning.
“Data from our December 2013 Datacenter Survey on DCIM shows that nearly 50 percent of respondents identified human error as a cause of downtime in their organizations,” said Jennifer Koppy, research manager, IDC. “When we looked specifically at large data centers (more than 20,000 square feet), 70 percent identified human error as a cause of downtime. This data suggests that a solution that automates critical data center activities, such as the Trellis™ Process Manager, is very much needed in the marketplace.”
The Trellis Process Manager enforces a process, including necessary approvals for making changes to the data center infrastructure. It contains four out-of-the-box templates for core data center processes – installing, moving, decommissioning and renaming devices – to ensure best practices are followed when making changes on the data center floor. Actions within these processes cannot be performed without the correct approvals, and all tasks are automatically assigned and delays escalated to the correct person or team. After tasks are completed, the Trellis Process Manager automatically updates the data center plan, ensuring the DCIM plan is always accurate. The templates can be customized as needed to reflect the organization’s workflow.
In addition to automating processes, the Trellis Process Manager helps managers, planners and operators to provide cost-based assessment, evaluation and recommendations to senior management to support budget allocation. The workflow tool provides a far more dynamic and accurate approach to assessment, which today is a manual process fraught with difficulty and inaccuracies. Now, data center managers can have increased confidence in the data center’s abilities to support IT/business requirements.
“The Trellis Process Manager adds workflow capabilities to the existing functionality of the Trellis platform, filling a need in the marketplace to remove human error and provide visibility to the effects of certain changes on the data center,” said Steve Hassell, president of Emerson Network Power’s Data Center Solutions business. “The addition of the Trellis Process Manager demonstrates Emerson Network Power’s commitment to developing holistic DCIM data center solutions based on the Trellis platform.”
