Although the weather wasn’t the best for last Thursday’s 2007 MIT CIO Symposium the attendence didn’t seem to suffer. There were probably 500 to 600 people attending. The sight that sticks in my mind was seeing everybody bundled up trying to keep warm under the tent where lunch was served. Fortunately it was a bit warmer inside the exhibit hall, although not much warmer. Welcome to May in New England!

The buzz around the conference seemed to be Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Everybody was talking about it. What I realized is depending who you were talking with it meant something different. For the technologist it’s about enabling technologies like virtualization. For the managers it’s about processes like ITIL. In the end you’ll need both perspectives for SOA to become a success.

I think the key take away from my standpoint came from the keynote speaker, Charlie Feld. Charlie is the EVP of Application Services at EDS. Charlie observed that in order for organizations to succeed with SOA a new management approach will be needed. Existing management tools aren’t sufficient for a service oriented infrastructure. Charlie also observed that SOA will be an evolutionary thing. The “big bang” approach is just too hard, organizations will instead evolve towards SOA.

Last week Akorri announced its BalancePoint 1.5 release. This was an exciting day for us and one that significantly impacts Akorri’s value in the data center.

As I’ve stated in previous postings virtualization is playing a key role in today’s data centers. One of the new features in BalancePoint 1.5 is support for VMware Server Virtualization. With Examiner for VMware users will now gain end-to-end visability of the server and storage resources being used by applications running on Virtual Machines. This will aid in troubleshooting and resolving VMware application performance issues.

In addition, with Analyzer for VMware, users will be able to optimize their VMware environments by getting specific recommendations for improving application service levels. Users will also be able to understand the impact in application performance when VM’s are migrated to different servers using VMotion.

Another new feature is BalancePoint Examiner for Oracle. This feature gives Database and IT administrators the visibility they need to understand how Oracle performance is being impacted by the infrastructure. By automatically mapping Oracle elements to the storage infrastructure users can see configuration issues such as contention points.

BalancePoint Analyzer has two new exciting features added to it. Our GuidePoint Storage Analyzer now allows IT organizations to understand the performance impacts of applications running on shared disk groups within a storage array. With a single graph user will be able to determine whether a particular storage disk group will have the performance capacity to handle new or increased workloads.

GuidePoint Dynamic Thresholding Analyzer uses historical information to determine seasonality patterns for important performance indicators such as response times and predicts 48 hours into the future what users can expect to see from those important indicators. Instead of reacting to poor performance IT administers can now proactively prevent performance problems.

These features are the basis for understanding application performance running in a virtual, service orientated, data center. BalancePoint 1.5 now gives customers the ability to deploy, troubleshoot, and optimize virtual environments with confidence. From the early feedback we’ve been receiving from customers and analysts I’m confident BalancePoint 1.5 will be a huge success.

I have the honor of sitting on a discussion panel for the 2007 MIT CIO Symposium. The symposium will be held on Thursday, May 17^th at the MIT Krege Auditorium. The topic for this years Symposium is Trends in enterprise IT infrastructure: Enabling the agile enterprise, a subject that I think is very important to todays data center. I’m sure we’ll have a great turnout and maybe I’ll get a chance to meet with some of you. In a future post I’ll let you know how the discussion goes.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been hearing from customers and analysts that Onaro has been saying that with the introduction of their Application Insight 2.0 application that they can now do what BalancePoint does. I just don’t get it!

Onaro has a very capable SAN management product while Akorri’s product provides application service level management. The differences are so fundamental it’s hard to understand how they could come to the conclusion that we have competing products.

Onaro’s SANscreen products collect information from the SAN switch. Akorri’s BalancePoint collects its information from multiple points within the infrastructure, such as applications, servers, storage arrays, and virtualization components such as VMware. SANscreen does a good job of informing you when switch ports are misconfigured or when port faults exist. With the introduction of Application Insight 2.0, they can also report on switch port performance. From this you can tell how much traffic the servers are delivering to the switch and whether a port is being over utilized You can not determine anything about which applications on the servers is generating the traffic unless you assume only one application per server is running. Nor can you determine anything about the CPU, memory, OS, file systems, volume managers, virtual machines, RAID groups, or disk drives. But that’s ok if you are a SAN management product.

BalancePoint on the other hand informs users where bottlenecks exist throughout the entire cross-domain infrastructure. BalancePoint provides an application dependency map with a performance overlay so that users can quickly identify which resources are experiencing utilization problems. In addition BalancePoint characterizes resources so users can determine if additional workload can be added. BalancePoint also can be used in VMware environments to determine if enough IO, CPU, and Memory capability exist to support a new virtual machine.

Like I said, I just don’t get it. Fortunately customers and analysts quickly understand the differences that exist between the two companies products. We’ve heard from multiple customers that they view the products as complementary, not competitive. I guess I see it that way too and I don’t really understand why Onaro’s sales people would be saying anything other than that. It certainly doesn’t build credibility with their customers.