Most enterprise data centers, including those at Cisco, contain a large number of equipment assets, such as servers, network hubs and switches, storage systems, and other devices. Although most of this equipment remains in place once installed, some everyday activities involve moving equipment to a new location or placing it in a temporary storage area before installation or disposal.

Given these activities, maintaining accurate information about the location of valuable equipment is a complex and ongoing requirement for Cisco’s data center staff. Yet the traditional methods of tracking equipment through manual inventories and audits are resource-intensive, static, and often incomplete. In addition, equipment is often located in remote field offices where manual audits are not feasible. In turn, inaccurate inventory data negatively affects the company’s ability to properly depreciate capitalized equipment assets, maintain accurate financial records, comply with regulatory requirements, and identify data center equipment needs.

Lack of data about lost, stolen, or misplaced data center equipment can mean a large financial loss when inventory audits are conducted and any untrackable assets must be written off. Most importantly, Cisco must track equipment that is moved or decommissioned because any data on that equipment must be destroyed in order to protect intellectual property, meet regulatory requirements, and maintain customer and employee confidentiality.

“We are not always 100 percent confident about our information on equipment asset location because that information is entered manually in our inventory system, which makes it susceptible to error,” says Chris Brannon, a Cisco IT program manager. “If the device is moved to another building, or even to another location within the data center, someone needs to go back and manually update the location field in the inventory records.”

Automatic, Up-to-Date Equipment Tracking

To gain better information about IT equipment location and movement, Cisco is launching a pilot project for radio frequency identification (RFID)-based asset tracking in its Amsterdam data center. This project will use technologies such as Cisco’s corporate wireless LAN, location-based services, and RFID for real-time tracking of all equipment in that data center. Cisco’s internal wireless LAN detects equipment with active RFID tags, then sends the equipment location data to an internally-developed asset-tracking application.

This implementation will replace manual updates of inventory data with automatically collected, near-real-time data about equipment location. All devices in the Amsterdam data center will receive active RFID tags for tracking, allowing Cisco IT to conduct a full test of this solution in a production environment.

The WLAN in the Amsterdam data center will use Cisco Aironet 1100 Series access points and the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance to detect the active RFID tags. The Cisco Wireless Control System and Cisco 2700 Series Location Appliance will correlate the RFID data to show equipment location on a floor map display. This solution identifies the location of a tagged device within 5–10 meters.

When the equipment is installed, the data center staff verifies and enters its physical rack location in net asset tracking system, which gives a more precise location. Future manual audits only need to be performed on equipment assets that have been detected as having moved, which eliminates the need to physically audit an entire data center.

The relatively small size of the Amsterdam data center makes it an attractive environment for Cisco IT’s first production-scale testing of RFID-based asset tracking. In addition, all equipment in that data center is managed by a single team, which is the management model Cisco will use in its new production data center in Richardson, Texas.

Proving the Solution in a Production Environment

Cisco expects to realize several benefits from RFID-based asset tracking, including:

• Improved tracking for the current location and movement of equipment assets
• Improved precision of financial and inventory records
• Reduced effort and expense of manual equipment inventory and audit
• Improved asset tracking throughout the equipment lifecycle
• Reduced number of lost, stolen, or misplaced equipment assets
• Reduced risk of noncompliance with government regulations

After evaluating the results of the pilot project in Amsterdam, Cisco IT will determine how to deploy RFID-based asset tracking in the company’s other data centers worldwide. Says Brannon, “By working through the implementation, process, and communications issues in this pilot project, we will be better prepared to deploy this solution in other data centers.”

For More Information

Cisco on Cisco
Cisco RFID Solutions
Cisco Mobility Solutions
Cisco IT Case Study on PC Asset Management
Cisco IT Business of IT Case Studies