Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Innovation Insights
By Rich Corley

Customer Support Matters

By Rich Corley

During the past year we have invested a great deal of time and effort in developing Akorri’s software maintenance and support capability.  There’s no question that support is one of the big differentiators between software companies that are loved by their customers and partners, and those that are not.  To quote Steve Jobs, one of our company goals has been to build an “insanely great” customer support capability, and we’re working really hard on it.

Our objective at Akorri has been to try to build a business that is innovative on multiple dimensions.  The top three dimensions Akorri is focusing on are (1) product, (2) channel, and (3) customer support.  We believe BalancePoint is an innovative product and are continuing to focus engineering on innovation while meeting customer and market needs.  With regard to the channel, my goal has been to become recognized by channel partners and their customers as their favorite company to work with in the virtualization management space.  With regard to the customer support dimension, I believe we have made excellent progress.  Every week now I get emails out of the blue from users and potential customers about how one of our support people (Paul, Robert, Don, James, Fritz, Rick, Mike, John, etc.) went the extra mile.  I love that! 

In terms of how we are trying to innovate in support, I don’t mean to suggest that our support offering is entirely unique, or perfect (yet), but there are a number of things we do that I think stand out:

  • When a potential customer evaluates our product, we provide them full access to our customer support and treat them exactly as if they were a paying customer.  Many companies don’t do this because it costs money, but the way we see it, you need to have a chance to evaluate not just the product but also the support.  Our support is available 24×7x365, and can be contacted by phone, email, through the support portal, or at www.akorri.com/support.
  • When we come out with new releases, upgrades have been covered under support, for both minor and also major releases.  When we came out with BalancePoint 1.5,1.7, 2.0, and 2.3 all our customers got upgraded.  Our next major release will be 3.0, and all our existing customers are going to get that without an additional charge.  Other software companies also do this, but many charge for major releases.  We have not done that.  As with 2.0, in 3.0 we will be offering major new functionality, and that is included under the support agreement. 
  • Customers get a login to our customer support portal and a very comprehensive knowledge-base, technical FAQs, documentation, updates, etc.  We also have online, on-demand training and certification.  Again, evaluation users get access to the support portal and get a login to the online training site during their eval period.
  • We do the installation for you, without an additional charge.  You can do the install yourself if you want, but we are happy to install the software.  We do this remotely from our headquarters.

Gartner Group recommends that a software company’s support capability be evaluated on four criteria: (1) installation support, (2) ongoing support, (3) availability, and (4) support reputation.  We are doing our best to build a support capability that exceeds expectations on all of these criteria.  Let me know how you think we’re doing at rich@akorri.com.

March 4, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Inside Akorri | Leave a Comment 

CIO Magazine Publishes Case Study

By Rich Corley

Yesterday CIO magazine published an article showcasing the experience one company had with deploying and managing VMware Virtual Infrastructure.  Featured in the article is Kevin Brown, Infrastructure Manager at Service Corporation International in Houston, TX. 

Like many other companies who deploy virtualization, Kevin needed to find a way to effectively manage his new infrastructure…especially as it continued to grow.  Kevin chose Akorri’s BalancePoint Virtual Infrastructure Management Suite.  BalancePoint gave him the cross-domain, system view and the detailed performance analysis he needed to manage this dynamic environment. 

Please read the article and let me know if you’ve got any questions or comments.

February 6, 2009 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Akorri Awarded 2008 Product of the Year

By Rich Corley

SearchServerVirtualization.com has named Akorri’s BalancePoint as the Gold winner of it’s 2008 Product of the Year for Systems and Performance Management. 

One of the highlights from the SearchServerVirtualization article is

The Systems and performance management software you choose can make all the difference in the amount of value you get out of a virtualized environment, but finding a vendor-agnostic product with all the necessary features that doesn’t require a Ph.D. can be hard to come by.

As SearchServerVirtualization points out BalancePoint is vendor agnostic with a large interoperability matrix (we work will all major server, SAN, and storage vendors) and provides all the detail data that any analyst would want to see but also provide high level summarizations that doesn’t require a Ph.D to decipher. 

It’s exciting to see BalancePoint evolve into the industries leading Virtualization Management Suite.  We’ve come a long way in our short history but with the speed at which IT is morphing our job is long from over and I think we’re in for an exciting ride. 

January 27, 2009 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

The 451 Group Take on Akorri

By Rich Corley

Recently The 451 Group did an evaluation of Akorri and recently published it’s article about us.  I’ve included the entire article here for your reading pleasure.

Analyst:Rachel Chalmers
Sector: Enterprise Software »»
Date: 22 Dec 2008

Event summary

 

·       Akorri has added a plug-in for VMware’s vCenter virtual-infrastructure management console to its BalancePoint software for performance management. The company has signed a global reseller deal with Dell and has greatly expanded its partner program.

·      The latest version of BalancePoint, 2.3, includes enhanced topology maps and support for Dell EqualLogic SANs, NetApp NFS and Brocade SAN switches. Support for Cisco equipment is on the roadmap.

·    Vancouver Coastal Health is using BalancePoint to keep tabs on key metrics around its datacenter virtualization and consolidation initiative, while FFVA Mutual Insurance has harnessed the software for active management of its virtual infrastructure.

 

The 451 take

These contrasting customer use cases demonstrate the flexibility and usefulness of Akorri’s BalancePoint. Best known as a performance monitor able to span the virtual server and storage tiers, it’s still extremely helpful in pure environments on either side of that divide. But virtualization seems to be driving adoption. Virtual environments are complex and new, and they interact with legacy IT in unpredictable ways. The powerful analytics tools Akorri can bring to bear are useful for both monitoring and managing the virtual infrastructure layer.

 

Details

Akorri’s BalancePoint handles agentless collection of management data from databases, servers, storage, VMware and storage virtualization, and analyzes that data in order to build models of infrastructure performance and utilization. With it, operators should be able to troubleshoot and pinpoint the root causes of problems in the near term, and plan for optimal capacity in the medium term. With the new plug-in, VMware administrators will be able to use BalancePoint directly from the vCenter console.

Read more

December 24, 2008 | Filed Under Akorri News & Opinion, Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Akorri Demonstrates Integration with VMware Virtual Center

By Rich Corley

At VMworld in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago Akorri demonstrated it’s support for VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC).  VIC allows third party applications to be integrated with Virtual Center. 

This is a great strategy for VMware.  I’m assuming VMware is trying to position Virtual Center as the one and only Virtual Management Application that customers will need.  By allowing ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) to easily and seamlessly integrate with Virtual Center then customers can potentially get the functionality not directly provided by Virtual Center from ISVs while still using Virtual Center as the "single pane of glass".

BP-VIC

The VMware team did a nice job of implementing the VIC.  If you are interested in implementing a Virtual Infrastructure Client yourself there is a VIC communities page on the VMware website that contains an SDK and some useful technical notes.  The website currently states that the SDK is "experimental" but so far we haven’t experience any major problems.

So in a nutshell here’s how it all works:

VIC process

The only problem we ran into was with setting the ExtensionClientInfo and ExtensionServerInfo type.  The type must be set to com.vmware.vim.viClientScripts.  That wasn’t clear in the version of the documentation that we originally designed from.  It looks like VMware has since updated the technical note making that clear.

Please contact Akorri if you’d like to try our BalancePoint VIC yourself. 

October 10, 2008 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | 1 Comment 

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