Tier44 Technologies: Data Center Management for ServiceNow

Clemens Pfeiffer, President & CEO

The IT sector persistently endeavors to achieve optimal efficiency but is faced with endless roadblocks. Legacy systems, siloed data, manual workflows, and duplicate tasks have all been hampering organizations’ growth for long. ServiceNow transforms these old, manual ways of working into modern digital workflows with its intelligent and intuitive cloud platform, thus boosting the overall productivity of employees and enterprises. Furthermore, ServiceNow’s configuration management database (CMDB) offering provides organizations with a single view of all their IT assets, which helps them manage and improve their systems more effectively. “With organizations increasingly adopting ServiceNow, we saw an opportunity to leverage it to address the growing data center requirements,” says Clemens Pfeiffer, President and CEO/CTO of Tier44 Technologies—a provider of data center management solutions for ServiceNow. Tier44 was founded in 2014 to bolster the ServiceNow platform with additional applications and functionalities that help manage data centers, servers, and applications with more accuracy.

Data centers are expected to provide uninterrupted availability, flexible capacity, seamless continuity, and robust security. In today’s world, these commitments are bare minimums, requiring data centers to also be able to anticipate risks, simplify and expedite operational tasks through automated processes, and deliver cost-effective, reliable storage capacity. However, building a modernized data center is riddled with multiple challenges—redundant and manual processes that increase the friction between users and technology, clunky and disjointed tools that offer varying views, and more. Tier44’s all-encompassing data center management solution fulfills each of these requirements. Built on top of the ServiceNow platform, it combines visualization and real-time monitoring with ServiceNow’s configuration and incident and problem management capabilities as well as IT operations management (ITOM) functionalities such as discovery, event management, and orchestration.

Tier44’s core product, EM/8^®, provides visualization, real-time monitoring, validation, and analysis of data centers. Certified and available on the ServiceNow store, EM/8 collects power, IT utilization, and temperature information to provide trend lines, history, graphs, and aggregations of metrics. Holistic power management features allow equipment to be automatically turned on/off along with dynamically shifting applications across multiple locations and adjusting server capacity based on the application load. Additionally, the visualization of the CMDB makes capacity planning more efficient and improves the CMDB data quality. “From allocating space for replacement, installing, and decommissioning to saving power and receiving alerts from the utility company, EM/8 does it all, thus drastically reducing both the human effort and the number of touches.

In case of calamities such as hurricanes, we enable data centers to proactively shift applications to a backup environment and prevent losses,” states Pfeiffer. Integrated with ServiceNow, EM/8 is the ultimate data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution—a collaboration that PayPal remarkably benefited from.

Automation and Optimization of PayPal’s Data Center

In a single year, roughly 8 billion payment transactions pass through PayPal’s Data Centers and global points of presence (POPs). As the business continued to grow over the years, PayPal’s data center operations became increasingly complex and tedious. Employees were forced to manually extract the data they needed to make their space and power capacity predictions, and it became nearly impossible to arrive at decisions grounded in reality. Manual efforts, disparate and inefficient processes, and declining data integrity and quality complicated PayPal’s DCIM operations. This drove the need to create a single pane of glass through an integrated tool ecosystem, automate every process, and create clean, connected, and actionable data using a single platform and a single CMDB. This eliminated duplicate data entry as well as the downtime in navigating between applications and merging multiple data sources as PayPal is required to continually provide a seamless customer experience.

From allocating space for replacement, installing, and decommissioning to saving power and receiving alerts from the utility company, EM/8 does it all

Tier44 worked with Deloitte Consulting LLP to enable PayPal to create a single source of truth for ITSM, DCIM, facility management, and asset lifecycle management, unifying each with processes built on the ServiceNow platform. It also visualized data center operations for heightened, real-time decision-making about asset procurement, space and power capacity, and facilities maintenance. “We collaborate with various ServiceNow implementation partners to develop new, innovative products,” adds Pfeiffer.

Earning Customer’s Trust and Innovating Continually

PayPal has published a whitepaper— available upon request to Tier44 or PayPal—describing the success of their data center optimization program using Tier44’s offerings and ServiceNow. An excerpt from the paper reads, “PayPal identified Tier44’s data center visualization software as a tool to access real-time updates for its data center space and power capacity.”

“This is what we aim for—customer satisfaction and trust. We don’t engage in hollow marketing promotions without the substance to back them. After all, data centers have a long life by nature, which requires us to constantly deliver value to our clients instead of a one-off benefit show,” explains Pfeiffer. To successfully serve clients and earn their trust, Tier44 believes in equal opportunities for all employees and values talent and diversity alike.

Since its inception, Tier44 has continually interacted with clients to understand what their data center needs are. The company combines best practices and models to develop applications and functionalities that can be integrated with the ServiceNow platform for better results. Tier44 will soon be releasing new applications on the ServiceNow store that further extend the depth and breadth of its offering.

In addition, Tier44 continues to add more features to its existing products, including better tracking capabilities, more effective visualization, and enhancing the ServiceNow user experience by embedding various graphical elements as well as the heatmap technology directly in ServiceNow views. With its current focus exclusively on data center implementations, Tier44 looks forward to scripting more success stories in this space before expanding into the rest of the ServiceNow market.