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.

We found out today that we won the Silver Award for Product of the Year in the Performance Management Products from SearchDataCenter.com. As you can imagine we’re pretty proud of our accomplishments in 2007 and we are looking forward to a busy 2008.

Akorri will be demonstrating its industry leading product, BalancePoint, at the 2007 Gartner Data Center Conference. The conference is being held November 27 - 30 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Please feel free to stop by booth #F11 to see BalancePoint in action.

Akorri’s CEO, Tom Joyce, will also be speaking at the conference. The title of his talk is Delivering Performance with Virtual Infrastructure Management Best Practices to Ensure Success. Don’t let the long title scare you, Tom is a good speaker and I’m sure you’ll find the session very informative.

I took the red-eye in from VMworld today so I’m running on pure adrenalin at this point. VMworld 2007 was a huge success for both Akorri and the virtualization industry as a whole.

I can’t help but to brag a bit about Akorri winning the Best of VMWORLD 2007 Performance Monitoring and Optimization Award. The judges from SearchServerVirtualization.com chose Akorri’s BalancePoint product from a field of about 20 other companies products in the category. Presenting the award to Akorri validates our Cross-Domain approach to virtualization management. Of course the other validation point we have is the strong customer traction we’ve been receiving.

I want to thank the folks at VMware for putting on a fabulous show. I also want to thank my team for all the hard work they’ve put into building and delivering a world class prodcut to our customers.

Akorri will be demonstrating its industry leading product, BalancePoint, at VMworld 2007. VMworld 2007 is being held September 11-13 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I will be there all three days so please feel free to stop by booth #1128 and say hi.

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.

In early 2005 as I started Akorri I knew I’d have to somehow discover and collect information from resources within the enterprise data center. Initially my plan was to partner with vendors that already did collection and layer the Akorri value on top of that without reinventing the wheel. Great idea huh? So I began the discussions to partner with a couple of the SRM vendors for our discovery and collection needs. The plan was we would augment their agents to collect the performance centric data that we needed. Everything was moving along nicely until both of the vendors I was talking with got acquired. Shortly afterwards I found out that the acquiring companies had no plans to offer API’s for these services. Not such a great idea now! I made the decision to develop our own discovery and collection service. Although it added to the demands on my engineering team it gave us the control to develop a premier agentless discovery and collection system for performance management. That was one of the best decisions I’ve made. As development of our discovery and collection engine started I asked my engineering team to support SMI (Storage Management Initiative). In late 2005 SMI looked promising and I was a huge advocate. Having a standard interface for management of storage components makes a lot of sense. The networking guys figured that out decades ago and it’s served them well. Anyway, my Engineering guys came through and developed an SMI collector that was one of the best in the industry.So roll forward 12 months. Our BalancePoint product is now Generally Available and we are deployed in a number of enterprise data centers. Each time we engage a customer we try to use our SMI collector where ever possible. The problem is it very rarely works. We’ve found that in a lot of cases the incumbent systems vendors haven’t deployed their SMI solutions in these accounts, or if they have, the SMI technology is very slow or worse yet it doesn’t respond at all. It’s become clear to me that the vendors are paying lip service to SMI but in reality aren’t supporting it.Recently we deployed into a customer site that contained a fair number of storage arrays from a vendor that has traditionally been a strong supporter of SMI. My field guys took this as another opportunity to try SMI. I figured it was worth the effort; if we were going to have success with SMI anywhere it should be with this equipment. Wrong. It worked as well as other implementations I’ve come across, meaning it didn’t! Queries took hours to complete! After trying to get it to work for a couple of days we were put in touch with the equipment vendors field guys. His advice was to give up on the SMI interface and use their proprietary API. We made the switch and things began to work much better.  I’ve been in technology for 25 years and I’ve seen this story before. SMI is a great idea but great ideas very rarely win in the marketplace. Good enough at a reasonable cost is what usually wins. In order to succeed the equipment vendors and customers have to be convinced that SMI brings real value. Right now though it’s the good enough custom implementations for management interfaces that are winning. So my question is whether SMI is dead or just in the deep trough of disillusionment? I think it’s dead. I can’t see the magic bullet that’s going to cause the equipment vendors to change their views and truly start supporting SMI. Customers aren’t yelling at them, vendors like Akorri don’t pull enough weight with them, and the heavy implementation costs associated with SMI aren’t very attractive. SMI can join other great technologies like Beta Video Tape on the List of Great Technologies That Didn’t Make It.

One thing I’m not an expert on is data center security. A story was relayed to me by one of my Sales Engineers that really got me thinking about the topic though.

A while ago we were installing BalancePoint in a new customer site. The customer has a fairly large data center with hundreds of servers. As he began with the installation he requested username / password credentials in order to collect data from a particular set of servers. The customer was eager to get us going so instead of waiting to go through a process to get us Akorri credentials he said we could use the same credentials they use for another product. He asked a coworker if knew the username / password combination. Unfortunately he didn’t remember but offered to go get it. Now my Sales Engineer was expecting him to log into some database or other application to retrieve the need information but instead he got up and walked over to a corner of the room where there was a safe. Yes, a real safe. He opened up the safe, riffled through a number of envelopes, retrieved one and brought it back. Opening the envelope he removed a slip of paper that had the handwritten username/password combination. He entered the information into BalancePoint and then returned the envelope to the safe.

As this story was being told to me I was chuckling. I was thinking to myself how low-tech nobody would want to manage credentials that way. On my drive home from work that day I began to think about the story again. I do most of my best thinking on my 12 mile commutes to and from work! I was still thinking wow, such a low-tech solution but I was beginning to also think maybe it’s not such a bad solution. Just because it’s low-tech doesn’t mean it’s a bad solution. As a matter of fact it’s probably more secure than the high-tech alternatives. Credentials stored on shared media, no matter what type of encryption is used, can still be hacked and accessed. With the physical security of the safe the access control is very well understood. Also, backups of the data aren’t really needed. It’s much harder for slips of paper to get destroyed in a fire proof safe than it is for bits to get destroyed or corrupted on a computer system. I was beginning to convince myself that the credential security scheme they employed may not be so ridiculous afterall. It’s ok to be low-tech. Right?

As I stated at the beginning, data center security issues isn’t something I’m an expert on. I’d be interested in hearing from the experts their thoughts on the topic. I might just go out this weekend and buy a safe for storing my own username / passwords in!