One of the powerful aspects of Akorri’s BalancePoint product is that it works across the technology domains within the data center. You’ll hear us refer to our technology as being “cross-domain“. This means we do not just monitor a particular technology within the data center, such as servers, but we monitor all “domains” including applications, servers, switches, and storage devices.

So why is being “cross-domain” important? The answer is pretty straight forward. Without looking at all the domains you can not get an accurate understanding of how your infrastructure is working as a complete system.

Let me show an example of this. One of the most popular i/o monitoring tools in the UNIX/Linux world is iostat. Server administrators use iostat to figure out how well utilized their storage devices are. The problem with this is that iostat was written for simple disk models, such as a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) device. Once we migrated to more complex storage models and introduced SANs, then iostat doesn’t produce accurate results anymore. If you used iostat to fix a problem or plan for future needs then you are probably in for a big surprise.

Figure 1 below shows a graph that was generated using the data from iostat. It compares queue depth vs busy time of the storage device. Notice all the blue points clustered on the far right. Analyzing this graph you’d assume that the drive is very busy and highly utilized. You might even make the assumption that this is the root cause of some of your performance problems and you may go out and buy more storage in order to offload the existing device. You’ll probably find out that it actually doesn’t solve your problem.

Figure 1

Figure 2 below shows another graph of the same test just from a different perspective. This time we are monitoring the traffic using a Fibre Channel Analyzer at the storage device itself. As you can see a very different picture. This time you see the storage device is about 80% busy, still highly utilized but probably ok.

Figure 2

So as you can see if you used your server centric tools to understand how your server was interacting with your storage subsystems you’d probably be making some very bad assumptions about it’s operation.

A lot of products these days are beginning to appear in the marketplace that claim they can help you manage your data center. Products like VKernal’s Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer have the problem of being domain centric. Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer can not possibly tell you with any accuracy how well performing or utilized your storage system is due to it’s server centric view.

In order to fully understand the operation of your complete system you need to have a true cross-domain view. My advice before you purchase any tool to help you manage your data center is to ask the question of the vendor “Does your product support a cross-domain view of my infrastructure.”

Gartner recently released it’s Cool Vendor Report in Server Virtualization Management and Akorri was named one of the Cool Vendors in this space.  I’m excited about our company being recognized as a "cool vendor" in this emerging space. 

It’s clear to me that Gartner understands that the Virtualized Data Center requires a new paradigm when it comes to managing this dynamic infrastructure.  A quote from their Key Findings points this out. 

The ease with which virtual machines (VMs) can be created and/or removed as well as dynamically relocated is calling into question the capabilities of many traditional management tools that were not originally designed for this environment.  

In the report Cameron Haight states that one of the challenges he sees for Akorri is

Akorri’s most direct competitor was a recent introduction by Onaro, which was recently acquired by NetApp, and the combination of these two companies may provide the means to potentially cut into Akorri’s technology lead. 

I don’t really understand this since Onaro and Akorri provide solutions in very different spaces.  See my previous post on this topic. 

Shortly before the acquisition, Onaro started talking about providing a solution called VM Insight.  From looking at their website it seems to me that what VM Insight does is that it pulls statistics from VMware Virtual Center and redisplays those stats in their GUI.  It seems that is a popular thing to do these days.  Another vendor, VKernel, announced that they were going to provide a product that does the same thing.  It’s not clear to me what value that really brings to customers since all that information is obviously available in Virtual Center.  In VKernels case they can’t even provide a cross domain view.  The only visibility they have is what Virtual Center provides to them. 

Akorri’s BalancePoint on the other hand collects information from the Database, Server, Switch, and Storage layers and uses that information in it’s Analytics and Queuing Model Engines to give customers a detailed analysis of what’s going on with their systems.  Other than seeing the complete system it’s hard, if not impossible,  to provide information that will allow customers to effectively manage their virtualized data center.

Last month Akorri announced it’s release of BalancePoint 2.0. This is an important release for us and it’s been a long time in the making. In the next few blog postings I’ll talk about some of the new features and functionality that BalancePoint 2.0 brings to the market.

Today though I want to talk about one of the major enhancements we made in BalancePoint V2.0 that is not obvious to our customers. That enhancement is the implementation of a “services based architecture” (SBA).

There is a lot of discussion in the industry today about service based architectures but for Akorri the main reason to implement a SBA is the flexibility and agility it provides in offering new features and applications. Having well defined infrastructure services such as data access, reporting, security, etc will make the delivery of new features and applications easier and quicker to develop and deliver to the marketplace. Our SBA implementation will allow us to offer new applications without have to “rip up and replace” any of the existing infrastructure. Scalability, overall performance, and adaptability are other benefits we’ll see with this architecture.

In an upcoming post I’ll talk about another important feature of BalancePoint 2.0 which is our delivery of BalancePoint as a virtual appliance. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the virtual appliance world and I’ll discuss some of the benefits we get from offering a virtual appliance as well as some of the challenges we faced.