Trellis Data Centre Platform Reduces Complexity

Emerson Network Power and its software division, Avocent, have launched for general availability a new data centre platform called Trellis, a hardware and software package that one simply plugs in, connects to all the necessary nodes, and puts to work.

Trellis, which runs on Oracle’s fast and power-efficient new servers and Java-based Fusion middleware, is an open architecture-based data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) package with real-time event-analysis capabilities across all physical and logical systems in the data centre. It can be accessed by either an on-site application or remotely by a web-based user interface.

Single console

With Trellis, one can check the I/O performance of any server, rack of servers, storage array or networking switch while at the same time monitoring temperatures in the hot and cold aisles, humidity readings and power intake. All this real-time information is converged into a single console view.

Trellis has been tested on a selected-customer basis for about two years by some large users, including longtime customer Infosys, a bank and a telco. Emerson Avocent took its time in development to make sure the platform had all the necessary features, reliability and scalability necessary to be a large enterprise appliance. During that review time, user-requested features were added, tweaks made and improvements incorporated.

Trellis is designed to bridge what Emerson calls a “critical gap” between a data centre’s IT equipment and facilities infrastructure.

Steve Hassell, president of Emerson’s Avocent software business, told eWEEK that Trellis “manages the ebb and flow of the infrastructure holistically from a central control dashboard. This is aimed to help data centre managers make smarter decisions about efficiency, availability and capacity utilisation.

New complexities

“Virtualisation has brought greater flexibility and efficiency to data centre management, but has introduced new complexities and pressures to the static physical infrastructure,” Hassell said.

Trellis software applications in the package are:

• Trellis Inventory Manager: Provides data centre management with the foundation for an accurate and complete model of its data centres globally, the knowledge of where devices and equipment are located, the relationship between these components, and what resources are being used by data centre equipment.
• Trellis Site Manager: Reports the health of the infrastructure including environmental conditions to data centre personnel, enabling them to recognise and resolve conditions that impact infrastructure availability and system performance.
• Trellis Change Planner: Works together with Trellis Inventory Manager to ensure that accurate and consistent information is utilised. Assures that installs, moves and decommissions of equipment are planned, tracked and communicated to team members in a consistent manner. This minimises the impact of changes on the quality of services delivered and streamlines operations.
• Trellis Energy Insight: Calculates total data centre energy consumption, electrical costs and power usage effectiveness (PUE)/data centre infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) value. Having this information at their fingertips allows data centre managers to understand how infrastructure changes impact energy efficiency and, subsequently, the bottom line.

“The Trellis platform is going to be a comprehensive and powerful system,” said Andy Lawrence, research vice president for data centre Technology at 451 Research. “The system design and architecture, all based on real-time data, are unlike anything on the market today, and should be both flexible and highly scalable.”

“One of the more impressive features of the Trellis platform is that it has been designed and engineered with ease of use and simplicity in mind – the designers have paid a lot of attention to how data centre personnel work,” Lawrence said. “The information required to manage the data centre is presented in context of the operation, which should be intuitive and increase productivity.”

Emerson’s Trellis DCIM is available now, Hassell said. Pricing information is available upon consultation.

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