The Hybrid Infrastructure – Or Taming of the Shrew?

Hybrid is all the buzz, from hybrid cloud, hybrid infrastructure, to hybrid architecture.  The hybrid hype has never been more obvious than at Gartner’s recent IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas.  This conference has morphed from a data center centric focus into an IT Infrastructure show. It emphasizes the new diversity of vendors focusing on hybrid IT.  This shift is leaving some of the old Data Center centric companies, such as Schneider, Geist, and Sunbird, out in the cold.

What is Hybrid IT? 

The new IT Infrastructure is a combination of modernized on-premise data centers, colocation installations, edge computing, and the public cloud.  An old colleague of mine, Alex Lam, now Vice President of Strategy at Fujitsu, was recently quoted: “The primary benefits of implementing hybrid cloud infrastructure are to seamlessly blend private, public and managed cloud with existing on-premises IT.”  Organizations need partners and products that can help them adapt, navigate, and optimize their business in such a new world.

Why did IT Infrastructure Evolve?

The world now demands more data, faster transactions, and reliable access, but not at any cost.  Operating budgets and resources are not increasing just because of these demands, and in many cases, are being reduced.  The traditional data center environment cannot support all these demands. So, the hybridization of the modern compute infrastructure evolves.

The promise of Hybrid Infrastructure is to optimize application workloads, to meet performance levels without over provisioning or throttling users.  The hybrid cloud allows organizations to place their application workloads in locations that provide the best balance between performance and cost.

Typical placements are centralized data centers housing Tier-1 applications, colocation facilities for cost reduction and improved latency, public cloud for DevOps, and elastic computing, the edge to support the transactional sensitive Internet of Things.

But You Promised!

While the concept and promise of a Hybrid Infrastructure is viable and exciting, architecting it, building it, and managing it is not that intuitive.  Organizations now potentially have hundreds of thousands of devices, millions of associated attributes, processing hundreds of millions of transactions every day.  How does one capture and tame this new Hybrid Infrastructure?

• Automate as much as you can, and keep automating
• Track everything, always
• Audit, analyze, and report

Nlyte’s Approach to Taming the Hybrid Infrastructure

Nlyte’s approach to taming the Hybrid Infrastructure extends the reach of classic Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) across the entire compute infrastructure.  In Nlyte, everything is automated:

• Finding and inventorying every networked asset and all associated attributes
• Mapping dependencies between devices, network connections, and application workloads
• Tracking planned and unplanned asset and environmental changes
• Delivering inventory, operating status, change notifications and alarms
• Automating workflows, managing their progress, and providing an audit trail of all activity
• Sharing information with and between other critical systems including BMS, ITSM, and finance

Real-Time Monitoring, Sophisticated Analytics

Nlyte provides real-time monitoring of critical infrastructure components from the data center, colocation installations, to edge computing.  Nlyte’s agentless asset discovery and inventory software monitors everything on your network, including laptops, servers, and IoT devices.  Nlyte ensures you have a single centralized source of truth to run your organization, providing current and accurate data to facilities, IT, and financial systems.

Nlyte provides a sophisticated analytics engine enhanced with Machine Learning to help you understand and make rapid, well-informed decisions to optimize your application workloads and minimize risk.

Nlyte has been focusing on helping organizations optimize their entire IT infrastructure for years.  From asset and resource management, risk mitigation, to application workload optimization.  See how Nlyte can provide you the visibility and management of your computing infrastructure from facilities to Hybrid Cloud.