RFID tags could help manage data center assets

Data center staff are typically not employed to maintain inventories of hardware assets, yet accounting for hardware, and the valuable data they house, is essential to ensuring regulatory compliance among other things, according to a technology research firm.

The use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by IT managers to manage their data center assets, like servers and routers, is gaining adoption, said Jonathan Collins, UK-based principal analyst with the RFID & contactless group at ABI Research.

Maintaining inventories of data center hardware is often a manual, long-winded task that can result in inaccuracies, said Collins. "There's a manpower cost there," he said. "They need to walk around and check these things, and enter this in the database."

With RFID technology, Collins said employees could simply walk around the data center with handheld RFID readers and determine what's present and what's missing. But while eliminating a manual process is a savings on employee time that could be best applied elsewhere, Collins said RFID technology can also ensure inventory accuracy, which is a point of sensitivity for certain industries like financial services that need to ensure certain audit capabilities of their IT infrastructure. "If a bank can't find one of its servers, there are regulatory obligations around being able to retrieve that data," he said.

Regulatory compliance aside, IT managers who lease hardware would benefit from the accuracy of RFID-driven asset management, said Collins, because they can trim costs by better identifying which equipment is actually being used and which is lying around gathering dust.

According to ABI Research, IT asset tracking may only currently encompass a mere fraction of a per cent of the worldwide RFID asset tracking market, but that figure will grow to more than 10 per cent by the end of 2013.

IT managers can use passive or active RFID technology to implement RFID asset tracking in their data center. With passive RFID, for instance, staff can use handheld readers to read tags placed on hardware that needs to be tracked. Also, readers can be placed above entrances leading from the data center so that hardware leaving the premises can be identified. Introducing RFID in the data center is certainly "relatively easy compared to a retail supply chain" where a heavier reader infrastructure is required, said Collins.

The cost of passive and active RFID tags is about US$1.31 and $10 each, respectively.

"Compared to the sum spent on the hardware itself and the data sitting on it," said Collins, "there's quite a good chance of ROI in a year and even 18 months."

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