Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is one of those technologies that everyone involved knows that they need, but at many enterprises, finds a huge amount of reluctance to make the investment in this core technology. This means that IT makes do with tools such as spreadsheets and other desktop knowledge worker software to aggregate data from many different management applications in an attempt to provide an overall infrastructure management view.
The issue isn’t just the cost; DCIM solutions aren’t inexpensive, which isn’t surprising given what these solutions are tasked with. It is also the fact that the solutions tend to be very complex, with many software modules which use a common interface but have their own sets of conditions, controls, and task specific behaviors based upon the module’s intended functions. This means that start-up time for the DCIM solutions tend to be very protracted and getting an IT staff up to speed can require lots of man hours that simply aren’t available.
In an attempt to get enterprise IT datacenters over that initial start-up hump, and show them the value of implementing a DCIM solution, nlyte Software has introduced the nLyte Express Edition, a version of their well-known enterprise DCIM solution that offers only the core components necessary to get started with DCIM. By minimizing the number of modules that need to be implemented and reducing the learning curve nLyte achieves their goal of reducing licensing cost (Express Edition is $1,000/month) and, more importantly, getting the software up and running more quickly, allowing IT to get the benefits that datacenter best practices with DCIM can achieve.
Co-incidentally, of course, they get the platform that allows the installation of additional modules and a more complete (and expensive) DCIM solution into enterprises that might not have otherwise considered it.
