Best Practice #1 - Identify Your Main Pain Points
“The accuracy of our IT asset database was abysmal before RFID,” the Program Manager tells us. “We only had information for 70 to 80 percent of the fields we wanted to complete, and our location accuracy was even worse.”
The company previously tracked IT assets with paper forms and barcode readers, depending on the facility. The data center management processes were so time-consuming that complete asset audits were impossible. Instead, the company would audit 10 percent of the assets in any data center quarterly and extrapolate an inventory report based on the results.
The Data Center RFID system slashed the time needed to take inventory – so much that the company can now identify all of its assets instead of a 10 percent sample and perform audits more often to keep records up to date.
“Inventory is almost immediate. I can do a whole room with RFID in less time than it used to take to inventory 10 percent of the items manually. Plus, I have 99 percent accuracy in my asset database.”
Best Practice #2 - Learn From The Best
There have been numerous RFID use cases for data center management. Learn from them and don’t reinvent the wheel. Work with experienced providers, and follow the best practices and recommendations created by impartial industry associations such as the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC).
Best Practice #3 - Train, Train, Train
Training is important for best practices to become adopted throughout the organization.
When the Program Manager toured the company data centers, he found that slight differences in how workers used handheld RFID readers made a big difference in their productivity. After watching one colleague take five minutes to inventory a room, the Program Manager demonstrated how it could be done in 30 seconds.
Best Practice #4 - Prepare For A Lot More Data
Intel leveraged Xerafy RFID to find more assets and to capture complete information on each one. Inventory processes are now so fast and require so little labor time that the company conducts audits more often. This all adds up to more data going into databases and software applications.
“Legacy systems often aren’t prepared to handle the amount of data IT systems provide, so planning, testing, and integration are essential.”
Best Practice #5 - Select Your Tags Carefully
The Program Manager evaluated many tags, from several vendors. He rates size and sensitivity as the most important tag attributes for data center management.
“Some tags had larger antenna so you could read them from farther away. That’s not what you need in a data center because when you’re reading a rack, you don’t want to get spillover from four racks away. The system is allowing me to have an accurate picture of where assets are in a room. I can isolate a server to a rack in a large data center in 77 seconds; it used to take 5 minutes.”
Best Practice #6 - Go For Custom RFID Tags
Intel selected Xerafy’s Pico On on-metal UHF RFID tags, which meet EPCglobal Gen 2 and FSTC standards and could be customized for optimal performance. The tags have provided outstanding performance and accuracy, even when inventory is taken in rooms with thousands of tagged assets with hardly any space between them.
“Xerafy had the smallest tags, and they were willing to work with us on tuning so we could get exactly what we needed. We needed that size and flexibility to make this work.”
Best Practice #7 - Think IT Asset Management Lifecycle
The Program Manager now plans to get more value out of its RFID program by being creative to track more assets and track the entire IT asset management lifecycle.
His advice? Think beyond the office or the data center – small RFID tags like the Xerafy Titanium Metal Skin and other Xerafy RFID innovations make it practical to track laptops, smartphones, and other mobile assets.
And innovation comes also from services, with the company now taking advantage of source-tagging, with all new equipment it purchases from its IT suppliers arriving with pre-encoded RFID tags already applied.
Xerafy is a pioneer in Industrial RFID, bringing to market several innovations that enable advanced industrial identification and automation capabilities.
In addition to a complete range of field-proven RFID tags available off-the-shelf, Xerafy offers Custom RFID Tags services, covering everything from a personalization service bureau to custom-design engineering capabilities.
