What is DCIM?
Aravolta's Workflow Management feature streamlines data center operations with automated RMA workflows, real-time status tracking, and dependency management across asset validation, maintenance, vendor coordination, and decommissioning processes.
If you run a colocation facility, you already manage infrastructure. DCIM is the category of software that tries to bring all of that management into one place. The reality is more nuanced than the acronym suggests, and the gap between what traditional DCIM promises and what colo operators actually need is worth understanding before you buy anything.
The Problems DCIM Is Supposed to Solve
Running a colo means juggling a lot of systems that don't talk to each other. You have a BMS watching your cooling and fire suppression. You have an EPMS tracking power from utility feed to rack PDU. You have a ticketing system for customer requests. You have spreadsheets (or maybe a CMDB if you're lucky) tracking which customer is in which cage and how much power they're contracted for. And you have people walking the floor with clipboards when something doesn't match.
DCIM exists because that fragmentation causes real problems. You sell a cabinet to a customer and discover after the fact that the power circuit is already at capacity. A cooling unit trips and nobody connects it to the temperature spike three rows over for twenty minutes. A customer asks how much power they used last month and it takes your team half a day to pull the data from two different systems and reconcile it.
At its core, DCIM is supposed to give you a single place where you can see your assets, your power chain, your environmental conditions, and your capacity, and then act on that information without switching between five different applications.
What Traditional DCIM Actually Covers
The established DCIM vendors like Nlyte, Sunbird, and Schneider EcoStruxure built their products around two main functions:
- Asset Management: Knowing what's installed where. Tracking serial numbers, rack positions, network connections, and ownership. This is the digital version of the floor plan and the asset spreadsheet.
- Capacity Planning: Understanding how much power, space, cooling, and network capacity you have available, and projecting when you'll run out. This is what lets your sales team sell cabinets without overcommitting resources.
These are genuinely useful. If you're still managing assets in spreadsheets and doing capacity math by hand, a traditional DCIM tool will improve your operations. But the name "Data Center Infrastructure Management" implies a scope that most of these products don't actually deliver.
Where Traditional DCIM Stops Short
Here's the thing that most DCIM marketing won't tell you: traditional DCIM products don't actually manage your infrastructure. They catalog it. There's a meaningful difference.
As a colo operator, your day-to-day problems go well beyond knowing what's in a rack:
- Power monitoring and metering: You need real-time data from your EPMS to bill customers accurately, catch anomalies before breakers trip, and validate that contracted power matches actual draw. Traditional DCIM might show you a power number, but it's usually pulled from a separate system with a delay.
- Environmental control: Your BMS handles HVAC, leak detection, and fire suppression. When a CRAC unit fails, the response shouldn't start with someone noticing a temperature alarm in one system and then switching to another to figure out what failed.
- Network visibility: Your NOC is watching uplinks, cross-connects, and customer circuits. When a customer calls about connectivity, the NOC tools and the facility tools are typically separate worlds.
- Operational workflows: Customer onboarding, remote hands requests, maintenance windows, decommissioning. These processes touch assets, power, network, and physical access, but traditional DCIM treats them as someone else's problem.
The result is that even with DCIM installed, most colo operators still live in a patchwork of disconnected tools. The DCIM becomes another silo instead of the single pane of glass it promised to be.
What a Modern Platform Looks Like
The gap between traditional DCIM and what colo operators need is why platforms like Aravolta exist. Instead of starting with asset management and bolting on integrations, the approach is to bring BMS, EPMS, SCADA, and NOC functions into the same platform alongside the DCIM features you'd expect.
In practice, that means:
- Power data lives with asset data. When you look at a rack, you see the customer, the contracted capacity, the actual draw right now, and the historical trend. No switching systems.
- Environmental alerts have context. A temperature spike in row 7 is automatically correlated with the CRAC unit serving that zone. The people who need to know are notified with the full picture, not just a number and an alarm code.
- Workflows span systems. A new customer deployment triggers tasks across physical access, power provisioning, network cross-connects, and asset registration, tracked in one place instead of scattered across email threads and tickets.
- Capacity is live, not modeled. Available power per circuit, per panel, per bus is calculated from real metering data, not from nameplate ratings entered during commissioning three years ago.
Why This Matters for Colo Specifically
Enterprise data centers and colocation facilities have different operational realities. Enterprise IT teams manage their own equipment in their own space. Colo operators manage shared infrastructure for dozens or hundreds of customers, each with their own SLAs, power contracts, and access requirements.
That multi-tenant reality means you care about things enterprise DCIM was never built for: per-customer power billing, access control tied to cage assignments, customer-facing dashboards showing their own environment, and the ability to prove SLA compliance when a customer disputes an outage.
Most traditional DCIM tools were designed with the enterprise use case in mind. They assume a single organization owns all the equipment. Adapting them to multi-tenant colo operations usually means workarounds, custom fields, and a lot of manual process around the edges.
Key Takeaways
- DCIM is software for managing data center assets, power, cooling, and capacity in one place
- Traditional DCIM (Nlyte, Sunbird, EcoStruxure) focuses on asset management and capacity planning
- Colo operators need more than cataloging: they need BMS, EPMS, SCADA, and NOC data tied together
- Modern platforms like Aravolta integrate these systems natively rather than treating them as add-ons
- Multi-tenant operations have requirements that enterprise-focused DCIM wasn't designed to handle
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need DCIM if I already have a BMS and EPMS?
A BMS and EPMS handle building systems and power metering, but they don't track assets, customer contracts, or capacity. DCIM fills that gap. The question is whether your DCIM should also pull in BMS and EPMS data directly, or whether you want to keep switching between systems. Traditional DCIM keeps them separate. Platforms like Aravolta bring them together.
How is DCIM different from a CMDB?
A CMDB (Configuration Management Database) is a record of your IT assets and their relationships. DCIM includes asset tracking but also covers the physical and electrical infrastructure: power chains, floor layouts, cooling zones, and environmental monitoring. Think of a CMDB as a catalog. DCIM adds the physical world on top of that catalog.
We have 200 cabinets. Is that too small for DCIM?
No. The pain of disconnected systems shows up well before you hit thousands of cabinets. If you're spending time reconciling power data across systems, manually checking capacity before sales commits, or chasing down asset information across spreadsheets, the size of your facility isn't the issue. The complexity of your operations is.
What's wrong with using spreadsheets for capacity management?
Spreadsheets go stale the moment someone forgets to update them. They also can't pull live power data, so your capacity numbers are based on contracted or nameplate values rather than actual usage. That means you're either overcommitting (risky) or undercommitting (leaving revenue on the table). The bigger your facility, the faster spreadsheets diverge from reality.
How long does a DCIM deployment typically take?
Traditional DCIM deployments from the big vendors can take six to twelve months, largely because of the data entry required to model your infrastructure. Modern platforms like Aravolta are designed to get operational value within days by connecting directly to your existing BMS and EPMS rather than requiring you to manually rebuild your infrastructure in a new system.
Can DCIM help with customer power billing?
Traditional DCIM tools generally don't handle billing. They might show you power data, but turning that into invoices usually means exporting data and processing it elsewhere. Platforms built for colo operations, like Aravolta, connect metering data directly to customer contracts so billing reflects actual usage without manual reconciliation.
Last updated: March 2026
Where to Start
If you're evaluating DCIM for a colo facility, start by listing the systems your team currently switches between on a daily basis. BMS, EPMS, ticketing, asset tracking, customer portal. Then ask each vendor how they handle those integrations. If the answer is "we have an API" for everything, you'll be building the integration yourself. If the answer is that those systems are native to the platform, you're looking at something closer to what colo operations actually require.