5 Stages of Data Center Management – The Rise of the Machines

Nlyte customers will often ask how their management of their data centers compares to other customers.  Every customer’s Nlyte deployment is different but we generally see customers and prospects falling into one of five phases of data center management evolution.

Phase 1 – A Static World

It is surprising the number of organizations and the size of some of them that currently don’t use any formal software, beyond Excel or Visio, to manage the assets in their data centers.  These organizations use Excel and/or Visio or hack together tools to just “get by”.   In these organizations, they often lack the transparency to perform accurate capacity and asset management.

Phase 2 – DCIM

All customers of Nlyte are at least at phase 2 where they are using data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software to manage information about their assets and the resources those assets consume.   Although the solution is not integrated to other systems, it provides a consolidated place for information about data center assets that varying groups can access.

Phase 3 – Integrated DCIM

Most of Nlyte’s customers exist in this phase, where they have begun integrating their DCIM implementation with other systems, such as ITSM, finance, virtualization systems.  This not only increases the accuracy of the information within all these varying systems but provides a more complete view of an organization's infrastructure.

Phase 4 – Augmented DCIM

Many of Nlyte’s customers have begun to move into augmented DCIM where the “machine” is helping employees perform their jobs more intelligently and automatically.  Technologies like automated discovery and population of assets, machine learning, and augmented reality support, all help perform tasks or provide information to data center employees so they can be more efficient in how they do their jobs.  This combination of machine and man not only reduces costs but helps improve data accuracy and data center uptime.

Phase 5 – Fully Automated

We all hear promise that one day data centers will be fully automated and robots will perform all tasks.  This seems like science fiction that is a long ways off, but one never knows, given how fast technology evolves and how important data centers are growing to organizations across the globe.  Other than some “lights out” data centers where there are no changes occurring, we don’t see this level of automation, except in some science fiction movies and TV shows.

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