The Agile Data Center

The business expectations of today’s data center manager and the IT organization as a whole have changed radically over the last few years. Data Center performance is no longer measured in terms of “keeping the lights on,” and application response time, but rather by its ability to become an agent for business change. Yet, in today’s challenging economic, being an agent for change doesn’t mean repeating the mistakes of the past. For the most part IT budgets are largely flat, which means IT must look for ways to provide better and faster services to clients who just keep demanding more and more.

In a recent survey of 300+ data center managers, over half (remove comma)(58%) reported that deploying a server in their data center took between 1 week and 2 months to complete.  As the data center environment grows in complexity, making changes creates a significant risk and takes more time and space, power, cooling and network capacities to reach their upper thresholds. The cascading effect of change can cause catastrophic problems for data center’s that do not have the proper procedures and tools to guide them quickly and efficiently through the process of implementing new data center services and data center optimization for already supported processes. Making changes is one thing, making the right changes, in the quickest and most efficient manner requires a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution.

There are a number of features and functions in the nlyte DCIM solution that dramatically improve the ability to correctly and quickly implement the Move, Add and Change (MAC) initiatives into the data center.  For example, the patented Auto-Allocation feature of the nlyte Cabinet Planner uses sophisticated rules-based algorithms to search through the entire data center estate in order to find the best location for a server or other rack-mounted equipment.  Auto-Allocation takes into consideration the remaining capacities for space, cooling, power and network connections to eliminate the risk of exceeding a capacity and potentially creating a much larger problem.

This Auto-Allocation step is usually a subset of a much larger workflow process that guides the data center personnel through the required procedures for placing equipment in the facility.  Using the nlyte Control Module, you can quickly and easily create your own workflows to direct your team to follow ITIL® compliant best practices as they make changes in the data center.  As tasks are completed, nlyte logs the events to provide a complete history of these changes and assigns the next task in the process.  From the nlyte Control management console, all active workflows can be monitored to insure that the work is being performed quickly and efficiently from the beginning until completion.  As an added measure of audit control, the nlyte Discover Module can be used to sweep all the data center assets, comparing their data record in nlyte to their current state.  Any deviation in the asset audit are quickly identified and corrected, assuring that the data in nlyte is 100% accurate.