Tier44 Technologies
Leveraging ServiceNow Innovation to Manage Data Centers

Featuring state-of-the-art servers and automated cooling systems, data centers are a wonder of the modern computing technology world. They offer a wide range of services, accessible to the largest of corporations in addition to the smallest of startups, providing infrastructure resources that were unthinkable in previous decades. With the public, private, hybrid, and SaaS applications/ services becoming upfront investments in IT, the data center landscape is now more complex than ever. Proper management of data centers enables IT technicians, professionals, and company stakeholders to work efficiently, respond to incidents quickly, and manage storage capacity effectively. Tier44 Technologies, a leading developer of data center management software, provides a complete data center management (DCIM) solution built using the ServiceNow® platform.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Clemens Pfeiffer–CEO of Tier44–discusses their services and how they innovate data center management through ServiceNow. The company is a certified data center management provider for ServiceNow and caters tomanaged service providers, government agencies, financial institutions, tech companies, and other large enterprises. Through ServiceNow’s configuration, incident, and workflow management, enhanced with equipment reference details, monitoring capacity, and runbook automation, Tier44 has succeeded in providing a cutting edge and comprehensive data center management solution to the market.

Could you provide us with a brief overview of Tier44 Technologies?

Tier44 is a premier technology partner of ServiceNow. Our solution is a Builton- Now application, which means that it is built entirely natively on the ServiceNow platform. In other words, it’s an application that has the business logic, user experience, and end-customer value all designed and executed on ServiceNow. Customers can directly download our applications from the ServiceNow app store and purchase the modules.

As an add-on application, Tier44 focuses primarily on data centers. We manage everything around servers, network equipment, storage devices, power, cooling, buildings, facilities, and extensive IP environments, to name a few. Our solutions are tested by ServiceNow and are pre-validated to ensure zero interference with the client’s environment. Tier44 is a Built-on-NOW application that gives customers the confidence to know that their application does not perform unauthorized tasks. ServiceNow aims at making the job easier for users. Its all about make work, work better—no matter the circumstances. So employees can be productive, wherever they are. Tier44 carries that forward to the data center, supporting site technicians, capacity planning, operations, asset management teams. For example, our applications help the technicians in managing power and space requirements. They can view the status of the datacenters and predict its condition for the next few months. Knowing the data center’s status in advance enables the financial team of an organization to plan accordingly. We have extensive experience working with data centers and hands-on experience in installing, maintaining, managing, and removing all equipment in the data center. With ServiceNow’s support, our applications help customers manage their data centers more efficiently.

What are the unique challenges organizations face when they try to manage the data center effectively?

Data centers are at the core of IT businesses, regardless of the size.

Datacenters became even more relevant in the post-pandemic business landscape, with a large section of the workforce working remotely. The backend of applications they use on their computers sits in the data center; and if the data center fails to operate efficiently, it affects the entire business. In essence, there is enormous pressure on companies to scale data centers operations faster. The adoption rate of hosted applications has increased significantly after the pandemic, increasing the demand for ServiceNow exponentially as the premier “Platform of Platforms” for enterprise software and digital transformation. From an adoption point of view, the pandemic has shown that many companies struggle with their existing infrastructures. Many companies failed to set up the infrastructure required to enable their employees to work from home, providing VPNs and laptops for their employees. However, once the business started to function at full throttle, companies turned their focus to data centers, and the ServiceNow platform’s adoption rate increased considerably.

Could you describe the features and functionalities of the Tier44 EM/8 application?

Tier44’s EM/8 solution offers data center monitoring and visualization functionality and provides data center infrastructure management (DCIM) to ServiceNow users. EM/8 supports various panels visualizing IT and facilities equipment, front and back of racks, floor plans, and dashboards. ServiceNow is tables and forms. Workflows are built off of the tables and forms. The platform also provides submission & acceptance forms, and a mobile interface. These features of ServiceNow don’t help the data center manager much by themselves. The manager requires information on various parameters such as graphical floor plans of the data center, the graphical representation of the rack, the position of the server in the deck, the rack’s capacity, power, space availability, temperature, and more. However, ServiceNow does not provide such information. Out-of-the-box Tier44 adds the capability for ServiceNow to visualize the data for the datacenter technician. Technicians can obtain the DCIM data of a particular data center and which enables them to perform various tasks. We present the information in a visually appealing manner and make DCIM more user-friendly.

EM/8 monitoring collects power, IT utilization, and environmental information, stores the data in ServiceNow, provides trend lines, history, graphs, and aggregations. The solution can generate trouble tickets based on thresholds or errors from the collected data. Typically, technicians need to install any equipment in the rack and have to count the number of slots to do it. Our application simplifies such tasks by presenting such information related to the infrastructure they are using. This significantly reduces errors. With the spread of the pandemic, access to data centers has become relatively limited. Our solution becomes a lifesaver in such situations. A technician working remotely can send the images to another technician who is physically present at the data center and can make the required changes.

Another essential feature that we provide is metrics such as power and capacity. The feature enables the technicians to understand available space, power, network ports. Above all, we use the same interactive user interface of ServiceNow that users love and use already.

Could you briefly explain the Asset Audit feature that you provide?

Asset Auditing is a new feature that we provide for early adopters. ServiceNow has a hardware audit module and a hardware asset module. The asset module gives users information on assets operating under the ServiceNow platform. Parameters, including the cost, depreciation, location of the asset, etcetera, are presented to the users. Tier44 extends this with quickscan capabilities to rapidly audit racks. Tier44 also partnered with Raritan and uses the Raritan Asset Management Strip for fully automated IT equipment audits across the data center. In less than a minute per rack you have a complete audit of asset tag, location and u-position using these asset management strips. Such features are critical when companies perform an annual audit of the assets they own and will reduce time spend by site technicians on audits by multiple hours per rack.

What is the future roadmap of Tier44?

We are adding more features and functionalities to the existing version of the application. We just released version 5 of our application. In the days to come, we’ll add more specific functionalities primarily in terms of end-to-end workflows as additional modules and make them available via the ServiceNow store.