Breaking News - Netuitive Announces New Virtualization Management Capabilities
Netuitive, a provider of self-learning performance management software, today announced new virtualization management capabilities in its Netuitive Service Analyzer product. Netuitive Service Analyzer, according to the vendor, is the industry's first self-learning correlation software for managing performance of enterprise applications across a mixture of physical and virtual environments.
Today's announcement is part of Netuitive's strategic push into the virtualization arena, the vendor declared. Last year, the company shipped Netuitive SI for VMware, bringing to market a self-learning and continuously adaptive management solution for virtualized servers. "The announcement today is really around the first self-learning correlation software for both mixed physical and virtual environments. This is a new feature that we are adding to our Service Analyzer product," Daniel Heimlich, vice president of marketing for Netuitive, told 5 Minute Briefing.
"Organizations are trying to go from understanding their environments from a siloed perspective and managing individual servers and databases to understanding the end-to-end performance of the overall service in a holistic way," said Heimlich. "What is driving this is the momentum around virtualization," he observed, noting that with the increased use of virtualization, organizations are finding themselves actually creating another silo - a virtualized silo.
Built on nine patented technologies and techniques resulting from more than 20 years of academic and commercial research, Netuitive's Real-Time Analysis Engine provides the underlying technology for Netuitive SI and Netuitive Service Analyzer. The technology performs sophisticated statistical trends analysis and multi-variable correlation to automatically determine normal system behavior, measure and forecast deviations from the norm, and interpret symptoms for proper alerting and diagnosis. When the software detects or forecasts behavior outside that range, "Trusted Alarms" are issued to indicate impending performance problems.
"Our differentiator is our self-learning capability," said Heimlich, noting other products in the marketplace are based on manual tools, scripts and thresholds. "They really require the guesswork of operators." But with virtualized environments, said Heimlich, "which are very dynamic, highly interdependent and very fluid, it really goes beyond the scope of human analysis to be able to determine exactly how to baseline those and set thresholds against those." For more information, go here.
Back
to top
HP Introduces New Software to Automate Business Service Changes
At HP Software Universe 2008, HP introduced new Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software and software-as-a-service offerings. There are three main components to the new offerings, all tied to advancing automation, Sharmila Mulligan, chief marketing officer for Business Service Optimization at HP, told 5 Minute Briefing.
First, addressing the risk organizations face from failing to identify potential conflicts or change collisions during the change review process and execution is HP's enhanced decision-support solution, HP Release Control 4.0, formerly named HP Change Control Management. Frequently, Mulligan said, service outages occur because someone made a change and "for the most part, the person making the change has not been able to determine ahead of time what the implication of that change is going to be to everything else in the underlying infrastructure." HP Release Control software, with new integrations across the HP Business Service Automation portfolio, provides real-time visibility into change activity so customers can identify change conflicts.
Additionally, with HP Business Availability Center 7.5, HP provides integrated business transaction management and advanced problem isolation to help customers quickly identify problems before they impact business services. By tracing issues from the end-user to the infrastructure component, these solutions accelerate the problem isolation and resolution process and help customers can proactively manage service quality.
Combined with the new Business Service Management offerings is a new ITIL V3-based configuration management system (CMS) solution, built on HP's CMDB, giving users what Mulligan called "the first truly federated CMDB solution." This is important, Mulligan said, because it is unrealistic to think companies are going to centralize on a single configuration management database. "They are going to keep multiple source of truth - all the multiple data sources associated with their systems - and they need to be able to aggregate all of that," she said. "With the new CMS, we federate across all of them to aggregate and correlate all the information across all the data sources and then present the correlated information back." To achieve this, HP is shipping a new version of its CMDB, Universal CMDB 7.5, as well as a host of federation adapters, said Mulligan.
More information about the HP BTO for operations portfolio is available here. HP Business Availability Center 7.5, Release Control 4.0 and UCMDB 7.5 will be offered through HP Software-as-a-Service in July. For more on HP SaaS, go here.
Back
to top
CiRBA Unveils New Dynamic Data Center Intelligence Capabilities
CiRBA, a provider of enterprise software, has announced the release of Version 5.0 of its virtualization and consolidation analysis software. With Version 5.0, organizations can build dynamic models of their virtual and physical infrastructure to continually identify opportunities to improve performance, optimize VM placements, and minimize operational risk. Version 5.0 automatically updates analyses to offer IT control over virtualized infrastructure.
According to Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and co-founder, the new release addresses the need for the details that go into planning virtualized infrastructure to be factored in on a daily basis when managing virtual environments. "Once you start virtualizing your environment, almost anything you do needs to look at all the technical and business and utilization constraints that the environment is under."
Using CIRBA Version 5.0, organizations can build dynamic models of existing IT environments that provide a consolidated view of the critical business, technical, configuration, and workload data stored in disparate systems. Pre-packaged and customizable analysis templates are applied to these models in order to provide the intelligence required to transform an environment and continually assess the impact of change within virtualized infrastructure.
Users can build these models and attach the analytics to the model, said Hillier. "Aside from being a really nice way to do it from a user experience perspective, it allows these models to have long time span,” he told 5 Minute Briefing. “Once you build these models, it just tracks your IT environment so that means the analytics can constantly update themselves based on any changes in the environment."
The new release also opens up analysis to a broader range of users, through intuitive graphical dashboards and email notifications, said Hillier. CiRBA Version 5.0 enables the results of an analysis to be directly inserted into any Excel-based financial model. It includes a default model that provides a TCO/ROI calculation, factoring in both capital and operational savings, and applies hardware, power, facilities and staff costs to analysis results to determine the true financial profile of each strategy being considered.
And finally, the software also aids in analysis of power consumption, said Hillier. It enables users to analyze measured and estimated power draw for individual IT systems, and rolls these measures up to overall utilization for groups of servers and entire data centers. Aggregate utilization analyses are automatically generated for P2P, P2V and V2V scenarios, detailing before- and after-consumption levels to show the impact of each possible transformation on power consumption. For more information, go here.
Back
to top
Texas Memory Systems Enhances RAM Solid State Disk Availability
Texas Memory Systems, a storage systems provider, has been granted a patent for its Instant-On Input-Output (IO*) technology, which it said enables immediate access to data from a RAM-based Solid State Disk (SSD) after a unit is powered on. Without this technology, the company stated, a half-terabyte of data could take up to two hours to be available from SSD memory after a power outage.
Texas Memory Systems' RamSan products enable organizations to manage high transaction volumes and larger numbers of users using fewer servers, thereby increasing performance while lowering cost and administration efforts. They are used in the financial, telecom, e-commerce, and online-gaming industries, as well as government, military, and research organizations. "In all of those spaces, they are used to accelerate databases,” Jamon Bowen, sales engineer for Texas Memory Systems, told 5 Minute Briefing. “In general, our products are used for the most important, most profitable, most critical applications inside an organization. If maintenance is required, our products can shut the system down, and turn it back on after maintenance quickly. This is important, Bowen said, “because maintenance windows for the most important applications tend to be the most tightly controlled,"
According to Texas Memory, the growing size of mission-critical databases and the falling cost of solid state disks have increased demand for high-capacity SSDs, creating the need for the new technology. A traditional SSD must wait for data to be entirely loaded from internal backup hard disk drives to the RAM storage area before the data is accessible. For smaller SSDs, the loss in availability is small. Without IO², large capacity SSDs are impractical because availability could be lost for up to two hours just to load data from disk to memory.
"This is something that hasn't been as issue as solid state disks have been so small before but as they are pushing the envelope to bigger and bigger capacities, it's a real problem that had to be solved," said Bowen. The new IO² technology "works hand in hand" with Texas Memory's Active Backup technology that lets the systems shut down much more quickly, he added.
Texas Memory Systems' Instant-On Input-Output technology will be available as a licensable feature on upcoming RamSan SSDs. For more information, go here.
Back
to top
Neverfail Announces Improvements to Continuous Availability Suite
Neverfail, a business continuity software provider, has introduced Neverfail ClusterProtector, the latest enhancement to its Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite. Also unveiled was Neverfail Version 5.4, which supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and is being tested with the latest version of Hyper-V.
Neverfail ClusterProtector offers continuous data replication for Microsoft Windows Failover Clustering ensuring businesses can continuously access their mission-critical applications and data. Replication of application data is done in real-time over a wide area network to the remote disaster recovery site. Should a failure affect either the cluster site or its shared storage, Neverfail acts as a failsafe to keep businesses up and running with no need to reconnect any application. Neverfail ClusterProtector is available for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Through intelligent monitoring of the cluster, Neverfail ClusterProtector can proactively distinguish whether the cluster itself can handle a node failure or whether failover to the disaster site is necessary. If failover is necessary, Neverfail provides access to an identical copy of the protected application and its data at the disaster recovery site. Once the issue is resolved, Neverfail will failback through a click of a button, the vendor said.
"With our 'shared-nothing' architecture, continuity through a disaster with no application downtime is now possible for clustered deployments. We look forward to extending ClusterProtector to virtual environments upon Microsoft's introduction of Hyper-V later this year," said Paddy Falls, Neverfail CTO, in making the announcement. Currently in beta, Neverfail ClusterProtector will be available in July. More information on Neverfail ClusterProtector can be found here.
Back
to top
Micro Focus Completes Acquisition of NetManage
International plc, a provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, has completed the acquisition of legacy-to-Web vendor NetManage. The acquisition was first announced on May 1st of this year. Combining the businesses of Micro Focus and NetManage will provide the enlarged group with further opportunities for growth through a more comprehensive and broader product offering," said Stephen Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of Micro Focus, announcing the completion of the deal. "We feel confident that Micro Focus will continue to build on our legacy of specialized solutions for integrating, Web enabling, and accessing enterprise information systems," stated Zvi Alon, chairman and CEO of NetManage. For more on NetManage, go here. For more on Micro Focus, go here.
Back
to top |
