ALOG, one of the leading data centers in Brazil, provides and manages colocation, hosting and cloud computing environments for over 1,500 corporate customers. It has four data centers in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, totaling 33,000 m² of built-up area and capacity for more than 100,000 servers.
ALOG was looking for a secure and cost-effective solution for managing their vast IT assets. Maintaining the IT asset inventory with manual processes, utilizing barcodes and human-readable tags, was too labor-intensive, time-consuming and prone to errors. By utilizing RFID technology – including Confidex’s on-metal passive UHF RFID tag Steelwave Micro™ – RFIDeas developed a fully automated system for ALOG to track and monitor their IT assets in real-time. As a result, the utilization of assets is notably improved, locating assets is easy and automated tracking helps to ensure that assets aren’t lost. At ALOG the costs related to lost assets were cut down by 89%.
The solution had a major impact on periodic inventories and asset audits. For example, the time needed for complete rack inventory was cut down by 98%. In addition to the time savings, the solution provided an accurate inventory of the assets, helping to ensure regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
“In general, data centers are required to perform inventory counts every three months to comply with government and industry regulations, but they need to do it more frequently for internal purposes. The existing manual processes are error-prone and inefficient. Automation via RFID reduces human error, inefficiency and liability, reducing costs and complexity while increasing flexibility and control, providing full visibility of the IT assets’ life cycle to the business level”, stated Lucas Almeida, Operations Director of RFIDeas.
“In order to fulfill every requirement and maximize the value delivered to our customer, we knew we would have to provide a best-in-class solution not only in terms of software and processes, but in terms of hardware as well. To accomplish that, our technology team developed a custom methodology to test a wide range of readers and tags from different manufacturers and chose the best ones in the end. Series of tests were performed on more than 20 different tags from 5 main suppliers. Confidex Steelwave Micro™ tag was chosen for the project as it had the best performance in every analyzed criteria”, added Antonio Rossini, Strategy Director of RFIDeas.
