– Mark Harris, Vice President of Marketing and Data Center Strategy, Nlyte Software, says:
This week, Nlyte Software, one of the pioneers in the software category of DCIM, released the latest version of our DCIM Suite, Version 7.1, which that included a wealth of new capabilities and customer-driven features. After nearly ten years of delivering physical infrastructure management solutions for over a hundred Global 1000 customers, we are focused on providing capabilities that enhance the fundamental economics of data centers and allow the re-engineering of operational best practices.
While this software update includes many refinements to the visualization of power as well as enhancements to the solution’s ability to integrate more closely with server-based LDAP authentication and the resulting reduction in the overhead associated with user management for their DCIM Suite, one of the key features is a dramatic new foundation for data policy management. Policy management is a rules-based approach to data integrity and can be seen in most traditional ITSM frameworks. Nlyte’s inclusion of policy management into its flagship offering demonstrates a major step forward in the world of DCIM.
With millions of devices under management by Nlyte’s DCIM suite and integrations with most of the industry’s leading CMDBs, ticketing and discovery technologies, Nlyte knows all too well the complex science associated with managing federated data sets that describe the operational data center’s assets. Since data centers are made up of tens of thousands of these devices (or more), each with a complex web of interconnectivity, the strategic challenge is to decide which of the various sources of truth take precedence in the big picture, and which attributes are required versus those that are nice to have. In addition, in a complex data center, the accuracy of data sources typically decreases over time as human errors and omissions become more compounded. The more connected a data center’s ITSM systems are, the more apparent the issue will be and Nlyte’s new Policy engine allows rules to be created that define which source is most accurate, which fields must be included to be a valid asset entry, and which fields must be unique across the entire data center. This makes great sense if you consider items like IP addresses and Serial Numbers, attributes that often times are reported differently, duplicated or in some cases omitted altogether by the various Virtualization and other ITSM systems.
We are the first DCIM vendor to realize the magnitude of this problem as it only presents itself across larger deployments, which are highly integrated. We have customers with dozens of sites and half a million assets. These assets are managed at the logical layer by combinations of VMware, HP, BMC and IBM’s offerings and these systems are in turn integrated with Nlyte’s DCIM Suite. We know the complexity involved in federating this knowledge and our new Policy Management foundation allows us to offer a powerful new means to assure the accuracy required in capacity planning processes. Nlyte Version 7.1 is shipping now and is available at no additional charge for customers with active maintenance contracts.
