– Mark Harris, Vice President of Data Center Strategy at Nlyte Software, says:
In early March, Nlyte Software, one of the largest suppliers of physical infrastructure management software, announced “Nlyte Hyperscale,” the newest offering in its DCIM portfolio. Nlyte Hyperscale is the industry’s first and only DCIM software solution certified to manage data centers with millions of devices, such as those that service some of the world’s most popular online applications in the cloud. A single instance of Nlyte Hyperscale can easily manage 150,000 racks spread out across hundreds of data centers, with millions of assets and tens of thousands of changes per month. What’s most impressive about our new Hyperscale product offering is that it is certified to provide the same highly responsive user experience expected from all modern enterprise-class big data and business intelligence applications.
So what is so special about our new offering and the ability to manage any data center at scale? It’s the robust user experience. Users of Nlyte Hyperscale enjoy the same great interactive experience as those users of our Nlyte Enterprise offering when those customers manage their 500 or 5,000 racks. With Nlyte Hyperscale,the user experience remains the same regardless of the size of the IT infrastructure being managed.
Large data centers end up with a lot of assets and a lot of change. While the concept of managing assets and workflows sounds straight forward, the amount of data that must be manipulated is massive. Every asset in a data center is part of the larger interconnected solution, so each change to any asset affects everything else. And remember that while your data centers may look fairly static at quick glance, there are likely hundreds or thousands of changes that are occurring each month as a result of remediation, expansions, technology refreshes and new applications being deployed. Keeping the data center model up to date is a huge undertaking, and one that underscores the need for a DCIM systems that scales with interactive performance. Imagine back to the 1970s when programs were punched into paper cards, and those cards in turn were handed to an operator to be executed in batch with hundreds of other programs, requiring each user to retrieve their results after an hour or more. This type of computing was hardly interactive, and change was painful. Now consider DCIM at scale and you can start to get a sense of the issue at hand. Change at massive scale is a huge data manipulation challenge, and the Nlyte Hyperscale offering effectively addresses the problems.
What some people missed in the Hyperscale product announcement was that it leverages the same amazing hyperscale architecture delivered in every edition of Nlyte DCIM. It is the same one Nlyte invented and has been refining during the past 10 years as we work with and learn from our customers around the world. Nlyte was founded on its ability to manage large amounts of change in data centers over long periods of time. Whereas most of the DCIM market has been busy trying to engineer high fidelity visual renditions of data center racks and rows, we mastered that simple feat years ago and have since led the industry into the much higher value customer use cases associated with asset lifecycle management. We’ve achieved these benefits in tight coordination with the other ITSM systems already in place. Our approach is clear: DCIM must not be an island. As a result, managing large-scale change must be tightly integrated with all of the other management systems in place, with a level of user performance that makes the whole process interactive.
Now while we rarely talk about architecture as part of the higher value story, it simply can’t be ignored in this case. The Nlyte Hyperscale architecture is our secret sauce and the reason customers choose nlyte time and time again. Managing infrastructure at scale is not about relying on Intel’s CPU chip roadmap to produce bigger and faster CPUs to run a DCIM application upon. And it is not about counting on the gains seen by switching from magnetic disks to solid-state drives for those servers either. Managing large scale change is about solid software engineering, which designs a solution that can be decomposed and distributed. It’s about separating key elements, such as the storage of data and the application itself, into functional modules and then allowing each component to be replicated as many times as needed to meet customer scaling demand. And when done properly, each component will work in harmony acting upon the same data set providing the desired interactive experience. This approach is in stark contrast to many of the other DCIM solutions in the market, which are comprised of monolithic applications coupled with single instances of open-source freeware data repositories. Those competitors’ solutions simply do not understand the scope of the data center management challenge. As a result, they can’t deliver the performance or scalability needed for growing public and private cloud data centers. We realized early on that any enterprise class management solution must look just as good managing a dozen racks as it does when your entire business is on the line managing the assets found spread across a million square feet or more.
Now don’t misunderstand my point; the Nlyte Hyperscale product offering isn’t for every company (unless they expect to plan to manage 150,000 racks over the next year or two). But Nlyte’s Hyperscale architecture benefits all users of Nlyte’s DCIM offering at any scale. It is a tangible technical advancement that is already setting the bar in the DCIM marketplace. Existing customers of Nlyte probably didn’t even realize that their installed Nlyte solution was architected using it, but they do enjoy the interactive performance we deliver to them every day.
Successfully managing a data center today is about managing its change and reacting to the business requirements at an increasingly faster rate. The Nlyte Hyperscale architecture brings the ability for any number of users to manage any number of assets at any rate of change. If you are in the market for the world’s most scalable DCIM offering, think Nlyte Hyperscale and dare us to show you how we do it.
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About the Author:
Mark Harris is the Vice President of Data Center Strategy at Nlyte Software with over thirty years of experience in product and channel marketing, sales, and corporate strategy. At Nlyte, Mark is responsible for corporate alignment regarding industry and customer requirements, competitive positioning and represents the voice of Nlyte across the DCIM industry.
Mr. Harris joins Nlyte Software from Server Technology, Inc., a data center energy management vendor, where he was vice president of Marketing. Prior to this, he directed all sales and marketing efforts for DCIM software providers Raritan, Inc. and Avocent, Inc. (now part of Emerson). Mr. Harris contributes many online publications such as Data Center Post, Data Center Knowledge, GovernmentCIO and Datacenter Dynamics. He is a lead contributor to the recent books on DCIM, “DCIM for Dummies” and “Data Center Handbook” and his work can also be found across many of the data center forums found on LinkedIn.
Mark has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Arizona State University.
