CloudPhysics, a provider virtualized workload management software, announced a beta program for its Knowledge Base Advisor, an early warning service for IT operators that identifies operational hazards impacting VMware workloads. CloudPhysics’ Knowledge Base Advisor is offered as a SaaS product.
“We are going into the VMware market mainly because that is our DNA, that is where we came from," CloudPhysics co-founder and CEO, in an interview with 5 Minute Briefing. It is also the dominant hypervisor in the enterprise space. CloudPhysics also has Hyper-V and OpenStack/KVM support on its roadmap as well, reflecting interest among customers in additional hypervisor technologies, noted Blumenthal, who is a former VMware Director responsible for the product management of the ESX storage stack.
The Knowledge Base Advisor analysis compares a user’s environment to what are known problems that have been published by vendors, bloggers and others who have published in some form warnings or recommendations, says Blumenthal. By necessity, the VMware vSphere operations stack or any virtualization environment contains products from multiple hardware and software vendors but the trouble is that IT teams cannot keep up with the fast-moving target of weekly bugs and issues reports from vendors' Knowledge Base (KB) articles, putting them at risk for disaster. VMware alone frequently publishes a dozen vSphere KB articles each week.
At the same time, the user's environment is constantly changing with applications modified, software or firmware updated, and new hardware introduced. As a result, the changes are beyond the ability of users to keep track of, said Blumenthal. The Uptime Institute's Abnormal Incident Report database indicates human error as the source of 70% of data center problems.
CloudPhysics' Knowledge Base Advisor early warning subscription service directly matches issues as they are discovered by vendors and users around the world to a subscriber's dynamic infrastructure configuration. Knowledge Base Advisor provides personalized and prioritized alerts down to individual virtual machines, servers, network and storage components. “We match your specific components to what is known out there in the world for different types of operational hazards, for different types of configuration optimizations, and we provide you that analysis with a very specific focus on your environment,” said Blumenthal.
This creates visibility to risks in the user's environment and increases the accuracy and effectiveness of responses. Powered by the collective intelligence of CloudPhysics users and their IT operations data, the goal with Knowledge Base Advisor is to enable IT operators to avoid operational hazards, lowering risk and increasing operating safety margins.
For more information, visit www.cloudphysics.com.