Nlyte 7 Extends Further Into the Data Center

The name of the game with data center infrastructure management (DCIM) has been aligning it with all of an organization’s business IT management. It’s what Nlyte has focused on in the latest iteration of its DCIM software.

With version 7, the Nlyte suite now includes extensive real-time monitoring of power and virtualized resources,  as well as centralized management of all the assets of the data center.  The suite includes a business intelligence engine, a contextual data repository, an intuitive web interface, improved workflow and business process management, global scalability, asset discover and reconciliation and resource visualization now extended to the rack level.

"The complexities of the data center have grown, so in developing the seventh generation of our software, we have responded to hundreds of customer-inspired feature enhancements," said Rob Neave, Co-Founder and CTO of Nlyte. "We’ve created a next generation data center management platform that leverages Nlyte’s patented intelligent asset placement technology, state-of-the-art data storage and retrieval techniques and business analytics for real-time business decision making. Nlyte 7 ensures the management of the data center fabric is aligned with existing business practices and ITSM solutions in place today."

The Nlyte data repository provides contextual relationships between all enterprise data center attributes. These interrelationships, and related workflow and analytics capabilities, support SLAs, technology refresh projects, data center consolidations and/or migrations, allowing for advanced capacity planning and facilitating “what-if” scenario planning.

Visualizing the Infrastructure

In addition, the Nlyte 7 suite offers contextual visualization that encompasses physical, logical and virtual infrastructure views.  The Nlyte 7 DCIM platform offers what it claims to be the industry’s only business intelligence engine, providing enhanced real-time reporting and dashboard information, automated asset discovery and reconciliation on your network. It has direct support for Intel’s DCM real-time energy metric technology.

The capabilities are extending both within a data center, and within an organization. “The operational value of DCIM is well understood,” said Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst, datacenter technologies and eco-efficient IT at 451 Research. “Companies are now seeking greater financial insight and management of their datacenters—to address capacity limitations and to make IT service decisions. Nlyte Software is helping not just datacenter operators but also C-level and other executives better understand their large-scale data center environments.”

Aside from the operational benefits, there’s a big push to make and present DCIM as user friendly. Nlyte provided a customer example from Grasshopper, which provides phone forwarding and management for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

“Before Grasshopper adopted Nlyte as our DCIM solution, we tracked our data center assets and managed capacity with spreadsheets and Visio drawings - that old system was time-consuming and nearly impossible to keep current,” said Craig Tata, Compliance Manager, Grasshopper. “With Nlyte, I am able to save five to six hours a week thanks to its repository tracking our data center assets, capacity and performance. With Nlyte 7, I am especially looking forward to the Physical and Logical Row Viewing with the Cabinet Device Overlay Reports as they’re able to discover and represent data that I would otherwise not have access to. Armed with reporting capabilities like these, I can begin to look forward to previously unforeseen ways to manage the Grasshopper data center to further our savings.”

Grasshopper's previous strategy - using spreadsheets and Visio drawings - is what a lot of companies continue to do to get by. Nlyte’s Mark Harris Vice President of Marketing and Data Center Strategy, uses a good, general example as to the benefits of using DCIM.

"You can do your taxes with an abacus, but why not use TurboTax (or other tax software)?” said Harris.