Nlyte Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
Schneider Electric Smart-UPs
Likelihood to Recommend
Nlyte
Nlyte is well suited for keeping a detailed inventory of the assets in the hosting center. With the ability to import hosting center floor plans, knowing exactly where each asset is located is a snap. When alarms occur in monitored devices, this also provides faster resolution because the exact point of alarm can be displayed on the floor plan. Nlyte is also well suited for organizations with data center assets housed in multiple locations. In some cases, as with my organization, some of the locations are Telco rooms or closets. Again, when properly set up, a device causing an alarm can be pinpointed to its exact location.
This is a very good solution for your UPS and battery needs for a data center electrical solution. The interface is user-friendly and alerts can be understood clearly. The alarms for service and maintenance keep you on the schedule and avoid any downtimes or performance degradations. I am especially impressed with the servicing from APC, we had a battery bank renewal activity recently and it was done very professionally, like clockwork.
Nlyte Asset Optimizer (NAO) tracks every asset in our hosting centers and when integrated with Nlyte Energy Optimizer (NEO), which monitors the hosting center environment, we can see, at a glance, the asset causing the alarm and its exact location in the hosting center. This is a strength, as it provides for faster resolution of problems if/when they occur.
Nlyte Asset Optimizer (NAO) has a lot of built-in reports that are great for looking at. For example, servers of a specific brand, or how many Us are taken up by servers. I see this as a strength and use this capability for capacity planning.
Notifications are fantastic. In the event of a power outage the email notifications are quick and easy to set up.
The web based GUI is pretty intuitive and easy to use.
The ability to combine these devices with other Schneider (formerly APC) devices is great. We use a number of older Netbotz systems. This makes it very easy to pull reports to give an overall picture. For example: The power went out at 7:00PM. This caused the UPS to kick on. During that time the air conditioning turned off and the server room temperature went up 10 degrees. You can then take this data to those responsible for HVAC and determine best course of action. This is hypothetical of course but you can see the benefit.
Nlyte Asset Optimizer (NAO) is currently all manual entry of assets. It would be great if NAO could provide for automated discovery of hosting center assets. This automation would be limited to ICMP and SNMP communication so not every asset can provide automated discovery, but it would be great for all IP addressable devices.
I have never had to actually call for support on these devices. The engineer that came to do the initial install was incredibly professional and knowledgeable. She was obviously an expert in the field. At one point we decided to replace all the batteries to ensure battery runtime. That was incredibly easy and did not need to call
I am still using the other three products as they have features that Nlyte does not have, and that are really out of scope for Nlyte. I can give one example because this product is an in-house application. It is our CMDB application, and it interfaces with several other in-house systems to provide data that Nlyte is not designed for. Example: If we get an alarm from a server, and if there is currently a planned outage with a Request For Change (RFC), we ignore the alarm unless it exceeds the RFC window.
We have only used APC/Schneider devices in the past simply because they are the most proven devices of this kind on the market. Like I said previously you cannot trust any unproven device in this kind of emergency scenario. I am not interested in exploring second-tier battery backups.
