Ben Grimes
CTO & SVP of Avocent Corporation
As the Avocent Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Ben Grimes is responsible for serving the product development and direction of Avocent to best serve its thousands of enterprise customers. He also establishes the technical direction for the company by proactively evaluating companies and technologies pertinent to the future of the company and the industry. Prior to joining Avocent, Grimes had a 17-year career with IBM, most recently in the appointed position of Distinguished Engineer, an executive position held from 2002 to 2007. In that role, he served as lead architect for software development for IBM xSeries and blades. Grimes holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University.
Session:
When IT and Facilities Merge: Designing and Managing Next-Gen Data Centers
PMI PDU Eligible
Data center managers wrestle daily with how to do more with less including reducing costs and managing rapid change with fewer resources. In a complex infrastructure environment that often now involves both IT and facilities, this is a daunting task without information and tools to speed analysis and guide action.
A solution to quickly assess current assets, including power and HVAC utilization, and visualize changes in real-time is needed to accommodate new technology (e.g. virtualization) and changes in infrastructure configuration. Many of the issues in today’s data centers revolve around an incomplete or inaccurate view of what resources are available.
By understanding the IT environment and visualizing what assets exist, the ability to make informed decisions about efficiency is dramatically increased. The resulting model will enable an entire IT structure to be managed more effectively and the effects of adds, moves and changes will be clear.
