Data center infrastructure management software company Nlyte unveiled a new feature called Smart Blueprints in version 7.7 of its DCIM suite. Smart Blueprints enables IT to preserve and copy any portion of a data center’s design, which can help optimize hardware configurations, capture comprehensive designs and easily reuse or share them with others.
Nlyte's suite includes extensive real-time monitoring of power and virtualized resources, as well as centralized management of all the assets of the data center. Smart Blueprints captures best practices for existing data center designs for use in future projects.
Users capture comprehensive designs at different levels of granularity, including materials, configurations, connectivity information and three-dimensional visual representations. The blueprints are saved and can be reused by the entire organization.
“Nlyte Smart Blueprints is an industry first,” said Mark Harris, vice president of strategy at Nlyte. “It allows for the complete capture of designs from the detailed specifications, up through all elements of an asset, including how they are visually rendered in 3D. So rather than forcing data center professionals to start with a blank slate each time they create specific asset designs, Nlyte Smart Blueprints simplifies the process, saving time and capital resources, by enabling them to leverage pre-existing assets.”
Common designs for Nlyte Smart Blueprints are:
- Highly configurable chassis-based devices which require individual blades, NICs and other modules
- Fully contained or functional racks, e.g. compute, mail or storage services
- Compilation of multiple functions that are individually housed in complete racks or rows
- Replication of entire pod-level designs for dense computing- or storage-intensive applications
The company is adding new licenses and customers every week, including big-name customers with 100 racks and above, said Harris. License revenue is up 120 percent year over year. The largest deployment is 25,000 racks in one site.
Interest in DCIM is high but confusion remains, he said. "DCIM is so much more than power and cooling. With customers we’ve been engaging with, it’s not just about lowering power consumption. It’s almost always about workflow and business process engineering. It’s a lot more than raising the temperature of the data center, it’s comprehensive. How can you possibly price out your user, unless you know the entire cost? It’s not just the server, the power, it’s ‘what’s the burden cost to deliver email to a user?’"
