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.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Akorri News & Opinion, Industry News & Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.