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Enzo Greco, Chief Strategy OfficerWhile there are a number of factors such as cooling, power, and space that contribute to high-performance data centers, look closer and what tops the list is effective workflows. “To explain this factor, let us consider an illustrative analogy,” begins Enzo Greco, chief strategy officer, Nlyte Software. "Why do houses exist? Not for the sake of the structure, but rather to provide shelter and comfort to the inhabitants. Similarly, why do data centers exist? Not for the sake of the many servers and massive power systems, but rather for the applications or workloads which run in the data center.” By and large, it all boils down to optimizing the entire enterprise environment from the critical facility up to the software to enable workloads to run optimally.
"Nlyte Software is the go-to authority on workload asset management and strategic compute infrastructure solutions"
As such, where Nlyte Software is creating a significant stir in the market is through their comprehensive off-the-shelf software solutions that empower organizations to optimize their IT assets and workload infrastructure. With an industry presence that spans over a decade, currently, Nlyte Software is the go-to authority on workload asset management and strategic compute infrastructure solutions. The company automates discovery, workflow management, and reporting across the entire technology stack—physical, virtual, and edge—including software and IoT devices. While their core experience is in data centers, the company offers an enterprise solution to enable workload optimization for IT, facilities, and business units through intelligent insight and comprehensive management of underlying assets.
Powering the New Age Enterprise
To address these points, first consider the data center facilities themselves. “Today, data centers are extraordinarily expensive facilities both to build and run. An ever-sharper focus on reducing costs and risks, while increasing flexibility, has placed a new spotlight on these facilities,” explains Greco. Importantly, data centers have an added aspect few other industries have: optionality. There are numerous ready alternatives to the traditional data center, from software in the cloud (such as Microsoft 365) to placing equipment in a shared facility (namely the colocation provider market, with many massive players such as Digital Realty and CyrusOne).
However, the inability to understand and plan for growth and efficiently leverage the various options to run workloads is the biggest challenge facing data center operators.
A survey by Uptime Institute, an advisory organization, reinforces the issue by showing that 48 percent of C-suite executives do not have the right information and solutions in place to optimize their workloads.
At the onset of any project, the Nlyte team gains a thorough understanding of the client's environment, challenges, and their goals. “It's surprising to see how few customers keep track of their computing inventory. One of the first things we do is documenting a client's workload infrastructure as it’s impossible to optimize unless you have a baseline of what they own,” remarks Greco. Nlyte's software solutions meet the entire continuum of a client's enterprise workload optimization needs, whether it’s around people, power, networking, assets, and policies, all backed by management best practices. Unlike niche vendors that deal with only one aspect of enterprise needs, the breadth and depth of Nlyte's solutions is truly unique. The company is a one-stop shop for all asset management needs, and all its solutions are designed to be agile, economical, and responsive.
Nlyte meets the entire continuum of a client's enterprise workload optimization needs, whether it’s around people, power, networking, assets, and policies, all backed by management best practices
End-to-End Solutions
For optimal workload asset management, the company offers several tools that broadly address three areas. The first being infrastructure operations and optimization, the solutions for which are designed to reduce the number of ad-hoc processes at play in a data center while improving ROI. Whether the need of the hour is space planning, energy optimization, or physical capacity management, Nlyte covers it all through state-of-the-art applications. For all power and energy-related concerns, Nlyte Energy Optimizer comes to the rescue in case of reporting, systems integrations, and risk mitigation.
To maximize the production value of assets, Nlyte also engages in technology asset management. “An asset can be anything from hardware to all the applications and software that run across different environments. Nlyte extends beyond facility to the entire IoT and assesses everything attached to a network,” states Greco. In that respect, the company's Asset Explorer is an enterprise software solution that automatically collects detailed information about every device connected to the network. To help optimize infrastructure assets and the operations around them, the Nlyte Asset Optimizer is another open and scalable software solution that manages assets from receiving dock to decommissioning globally or rack by rack, in a data center, colocation, or edge facility.
Specifically invested in edge computing, which is considered the next frontier for data centers, another groundbreaking solution offered by the company is the Nlyte Edge Computing software. Through this software, organizations can achieve a single pane of glass view of all assets from remote facilities. “While the industry is shifting toward a decentralized data center model to reduce latency and the risk of failure, a distributed environment calls for intelligent remote management. On top of that, edge data centers don't run independently but are part of a larger fabric,” explains Greco. Nlyte’s Edge software aggregates all computing facilities in edge data centers for centralized visibility while eliminating the cost of localized management products.
Underpinning both infrastructure and asset management is Nlyte’s analytics suite that is built on top of IBM's Watson. Nlyte Machine Learning is a purpose-built framework that captures, normalizes, and analyzes large amounts of data for improved decision-making and performance. “Traditional rules and management systems can no longer live up to the scale and complexity of modern-day data analytics needs. Our powerful cognitive system is easy to adopt and drives the performance, resiliency, and security demanded of modern day digital infrastructures,” says Greco.
Showcasing a Winning Streak
Just the very fact that the technology conglomerate, Cisco uses Nlyte's products in all their 24 data centers worldwide is a testament to the company's exceptional value proposition. Like most industry bigwigs, Cisco uses highly distributed data centers that are not only complex, but their sheer size makes them formidable to manage. Nlyte rose up to the challenge, and in no time Cisco observed measurable benefits. The company replaced all manual processes with automated solutions that were transparent and scalable. From physical asset and infrastructure management, power and sensor management, to seamless workflow management Nlyte had a solution that helped Cisco establish advanced and next-gen data center architecture.
Another case in point is that of Mentor Graphics, a US-based electronic design automation company that faced low visibility into data center operations, poor capacity planning, and had an ineffective reporting and analytics plan. Upon implementing Nlyte's monitoring solution, the client received the detailed location of all data center assets, a comprehensive view of data center capacity planning, and centralized insight of all data center activities. With Nlyte, Mentor Graphics not only had complete visibility into key business metrics but also achieved nimble IT service delivery and all this while reducing costs.
As a result of their client-centric outlook, today Nlyte has customers spread across the globe and boasts a 98 percent customer retention rate. One of the factors governing their year on year success is that Nlyte houses competent industry experts that hold a deep understanding of the challenges in the data center space. “We also follow an open door policy and believe in transparent communications,” says Greco. Evidently, Nlyte applies the same principle of collaboration and mutual respect that it follows in-house when it comes to dealing with clients, a core reason why clients keep coming back to this asset management expert.
In the days to come, the company plans on extending their partner relations to further enhance their products in workload asset management. Nlyte is specifically looking at partnerships and companies that offer virtualization or high breed cloud management solutions and critical applications. This will allow Nlyte to build a whole new set of features into their product line, with a focus on analytics. Headquartered in the US, Nlyte also has offices in London serving Europe and the Middle East; and in Pune, India serving Asia; and is looking to expand in these areas and add Oceania as well.
Simply put, as modern day infrastructures get complex and critical by the day, Nlyte with its strong pool of expertise and customer-centric approach all backed by ingenious solutions enables enterprises to architect the computing infrastructure and the data center of tomorrow.
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