This weeks vendorwag is with Robert Neave of Nlyte. In case you don’t know – Nlyte is datacenter visualization software. Yes, read that again – I said VISUALization not VIRTUALization. But for me the two go hand in hand to some degree. Virtualization hasn’t lead to desolately empty server rooms where nothing tumbleweed drifts by. For many virtualization helped them consolidate their workloads, and for the lucky this freed up valuable rack space. For the less so lucky, those virtualized physicals sometimes were wiped and given a new life – for others virtualization just allowed them to stand-still on the conveyor belt. In other words it deferred until a later period a move to larger facility – they were able to do more with the same rack space.

Here’s a bit of background on Robert:

Robert Neave is a Co-founder and Vice President of EMEA Product Management at nlyte Software.  As a co-founder, Robert co-developed nlyte, our industry-leading data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) suite to address a need for solutions to help data centre managers to make informed decisions for the planning and effective management of their assets, infrastructure power, cooling and space.    As Vice President of EMEA Product Management Robert is responsible for ensuring that nlyte’s product set retains its position as a DCIM market leader and continuously meets the needs of nlyte’s EMEA customers and prospective customers.  In this role, Robert also owns nlyte’s company-wide strategy for Green IT, helping customers to cut their data centre energy consumption and minimize carbon emissions, driving the company’s vision for enabling an environmentally responsible world – one data centre at a time.

Prior to nlyte Software, Robert was Data Centre Manager for UBS Investment Bank (Perot Systems Europe).   In this role he was the architect for the company’s data centre management systems, data centre design, business process analysis and authored the data centre’s operation procedures.  Robert was also responsible for providing global project management for the rollout of these data centre management solutions to UBS’s facilities in London, Switzerland, the Americas and Asia.

Robert has also worked for Equitrac UK, developing cost charge-back solutions for Legal firms throughout the United Kingdom.

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

As ever I did a webex with the Nlyte team to get more familiar with their technology, which then formed the basis of my questions to Robert:

Q. What protocols do you use to discover “objects” in the datacenter?
Q. What would happen if someone moved an server/switch from one location to another?
Q. Is possible that a new device could be introduced – that is NOT in your DB. How does Nlyte deal with this situation
Q. Do you support the new servers with RFID – How does that work?
Q. Can you show which components are out of warranty/maintenance?
Q. What’s the hardest component for you to discover, and visualize – and why?
Q. Nlyte – can give me advice about where to locate a NEW device in my datacenter, – but can it do datacenter “defrag”?
Q. Virtualization was supposed to reduce the number of physical servers – what’s been your experience?
Q, What are your future product development plans – I recognize you might not be able to say much here…

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

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