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nlyte 6.0 now incorporates nlyte Analytics, a set of fully integrated business intelligence capabilities allowing data centre professionals, managers and executives to quickly gain visibility into the information and key performance indicators that help optimise the critical resources of power, cooling and space leading to reduced data centre operating expenses and extended data centre life.  Users can gain detailed visibility into the current status of the business, enabling them to track how their data centre operations are performing against strategic goals and how day-to-day execution is aligned with the broader corporate strategy.

nlyte Analytics comprises of three fully integrated modules, in support of intelligent capacity planning, all based on a completely new and highly optimised business intelligence architecture utilising best practices in data warehousing, analytics and dimensional modelling.  The three modules provide business users with a variety of data visualisation and manipulation options:

1. nlyte Dashboard – The brand new nlyte Dashboard makes available a number of pre-defined dashboards which, through state-of-the-art data visualisation, provides senior management the critical operational metrics required to manage today’s sophisticated data centre facilities.  Users can, for example, see a high level roll-up of capacity data for power, cooling, space and network connections across an entire data centre estate, incorporating full drill-down and time-series analysis. 

Customers also retain full flexibility to create, deploy and maintain their own dashboards using the nlyte Dashboard Manager, which provides the ability to create customised management dashboards using an easy to understand wizard-driven, drag-and-drop interface and an extensive array of data visualisation conventions such as gauges, charts and maps.

2. nlyte Report – The new nlyte reporting solution provides users with a flexible, easy-to-use reporting infrastructure to create, schedule, analyse, manage and distribute reports for a wide variety of IT and executive audiences.  Also included is a rich library of standard reports to support daily operations, ongoing management and strategic planning.  These include; cabinet and data centre capacity utilisation reports, forecast reports, equipment breakdown reports, power and network cabling reports, PDU and power infrastructure reports, service request reports, change reports, inventory reports and many others.

3. nlyte Predict – Provides users with the ability to forecast and model the future state of a data centre’s capacities based on historical data.  The sophisticated modelling capabilities also allow users to minimise over-provisioning of the data centre and to accurately predict the lifespan of their facilities.

The key underlying architectural elements consist of:

* An Operational Data Store (ODS) as a replica of the nlyte production Performance Management Database (PMDB)
* A near real-time data warehouse consisting of a series of dimensional data marts
* An automated ETL layer to extract, transform, and load the data from the ODS to the dimensional tables
* An OLAP solution containing measures and dimensions that allow for complex analytical and ad-hoc queries with a rapid execution time

These latest advancements in nlyte Analytics significantly enhance the nlyte best practice process cycle which allows users to automatically discover IT assets, visualise the physical and virtual infrastructure, model move, add, change (MAC) initiatives, control data centre processes and personnel, report on progress, and predict capacity resources well into the future.  The nlyte suite provides a rapid ROI by reducing data centre expenses by up to 20 percent annually and prolonging data centre life by up to five years.

According to David Cappuccio, research vice president at Gartner, “DCIM solutions with advanced analytics and dashboarding capabilities will become a key part of a data centre manager's arsenal, providing valuable data needed to report on and improve energy efficiencies, identify potential infrastructure trouble spots and increase the effectiveness of capacity planning.”

“With nlyte Analytics, we freed up one-half a megawatt of power and our CIO was able to reallocate budgets from about 70 percent for operations and 30 percent for development to 40 percent for operations and 60 percent for building tools for the business,” said Ron Pepin, PNC Financial Services vice president and general manager of data centre operations.  “By freeing up power and space in our data centres, we extended their lifetimes from a five-year capacity to a 15 year capacity.”

“With nlyte, and its advanced analytic capabilities, we will be able to view, model and predict our data centre power, cooling and space requirements in near real-time which will enable us to make the most effective use of our distributed data centre estate,” said Simon Brickett,  head of data centre, managed services at Computacenter.  “In addition, we will be able to help our customers to effectively manage their carbon footprint by using the nlyte software to track and manage our KPI-based Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and carbon footprint metrics at an individual customer level.”

“In the current climate, access to the right information at the right time has never been more important in optimising data centre resources, reducing energy costs and extending the life of existing data centres,” said Jon Temple, nlyte president and CEO.  “nlyte 6.0 and its market-leading integrated analytics represents a major step forward in helping our customers analyse operational data to help them make the most efficient use of power, cooling and space through intelligent capacity planning.”

• Posted on: 6th December 2010 at 12:00am
• Topics: Hosting; Energy Efficiency; Power & Cooling;
• Content partners: nlyte Software;