IT asset management gets fancy

Sun, others keep inventory of physical assets using wireless tags.

Instead of spending $2 million each year to physically inventory the contents of its Newark, Calif., testing lab, Sun spent about $200,000 to implement a system that uses wireless-sensor technology to find gear.

The 6,000-square-foot facility houses more than 10,000 servers and other computing devices. By tagging each with an RFID label, Sun can verify the location - down to the server rack - and physical characteristics of every lab asset, whether or not it's linked to a network.

"In this kind of environment, assets go online and offline quite a bit, and they get moved around," says Julie Sarbacker, director of Sun's RFID business unit. Traditional network-based asset-management software doesn't keep tabs on non-networked assets, so devices that weren't in use often weren't accounted for, she says.

Sun isn't alone in turning to technology for help in locating and managing expensive physical assets, according to The Yankee Group. Enterprise adoption will drive the market for real-time location systems from $20 million in 2005 to $1.6 billion by 2010, the research firm estimates. The surge is caused in part by accelerating Wi-Fi deployments and the availability of more-mature RFID technologies.

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Instead of spending $2 million each year to physically inventory the contents of its Newark, Calif., testing lab, Sun spent about $200,000 to implement a system that uses wireless-sensor technology to find gear.

The 6,000-square-foot facility houses more than 10,000 servers and other computing devices. By tagging each with an RFID label, Sun can verify the location - down to the server rack - and physical characteristics of every lab asset, whether or not it's linked to a network.

"In this kind of environment, assets go online and offline quite a bit, and they get moved around," says Julie Sarbacker, director of Sun's RFID business unit. Traditional network-based asset-management software doesn't keep tabs on non-networked assets, so devices that weren't in use often weren't accounted for, she says.

Sun isn't alone in turning to technology for help in locating and managing expensive physical assets, according to The Yankee Group. Enterprise adoption will drive the market for real-time location systems from $20 million in 2005 to $1.6 billion by 2010, the research firm estimates. The surge is caused in part by accelerating Wi-Fi deployments and the availability of more-mature RFID technologies.

The primary users of real-time location systems are healthcare, manufacturing and logistics companies, says Marcus Torchia, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group. Healthcare companies use location systems to keep tabs on easily misplaced hospital mobile medical equipment, for example.

To date, tracking enterprise assets, such as servers, with RFID is a very small subset of the market, but it's a valid scenario, Torchia says. "The beauty of the technology is you can tag any asset and have visibility to it, inside a building or on a campus. It doesn't really matter where it is or what its application is."

In the past Sun hired an outside contractor every year to take a physical inventory, which required scanning bar codes on the back of each device. It could take 5 to 20 minutes to inventory the contents of a single server rack, and a lab-wide inventory took weeks, Sarbacker says. Now, because RFID tags don't have to be seen to be read, the lab can conduct an inventory on its own in less than an hour.

The result is that Sun can better track how its assets are allocated and avoid duplicate or unnecessary hardware purchases, says Jim Clarke, the company's chief RFID architect. "Because there's better visibility, we're better able to manage the resources and don't have to buy more computers when some get misplaced," he says.

In addition to the Newark lab rollout, Sun tried out the asset-tracking system in its Milpitas, Calif., distribution center, which handles trade-show equipment. The success of these internal projects prompted Sun to put together a commercial version of the RFID-based technology, which it announced late last month.

Click to see: Keeping tabs on IT gear