The granular management of all assets being placed or moved within a datacenter has become highly desirable over the past several years. Important to note is that most major companies will claim to already solved the asset management needs with an array of typically disconnected and many times complex sets of tabular asset manager products. These same companies are now quietly looking for ’something else’ to help get them to where they ‘really’ need to be… 

The newest generation of asset management suites are focused on visually representing assets with a drag-and-drop approach to adds, moves and changes. These new lifecycle management suites allow equipment to be added, moved or changed in existing facilities in a highly predictable and efficient manner. Examples of these modern suites include Aperture, Altima/Netzoom, Rackwise, nLyte, Avocent, ShowRack, APC, VisualDatacenter, Raritan/dcTrack, FieldView and a handful of others. Each of these management software suites has been crafted to allow complex data centers to be visually articulated with a high degree of fidelity, identifying everything from the manufacturer, model and serial number, to the purchase date, PO number, owner’s name and physical location.