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.

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.

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.

Mario Apicella asked a very interesting question on Friday: “Is storage management already past its prime?”

He wrote:

It may sound hasty to dismiss a technology that many companies have yet to deploy or even evaluate, but some of the vibes I am getting lately from vendors suggest that storage management applications may become obsolete before becoming mainstream.

It’s hard to give a short answer to the question of what’s wrong with storage management, but perhaps the beginning of the end for the technology is the limited scope revealed by its name.

Does it make sense to devolve so much effort to rein in just a single piece of the infrastructure puzzle? Shouldn’t storage be orchestrated in harmony with other important — perhaps even more important — pillars such as servers, networks, and above all, applications?

I think he’s right because the IT Data Center has evolved to a shared, virtualized world. It is no longer sufficient to look at and understand just one piece of the puzzle. A holistic view of the problem must be taken.

Recently I was on a sales call at a very large enterprise. Its data center contains thousands of servers and petabytes of storage. The person with whom I was talking had a mission. His mission was to optimize his server utilization. He realized that the pitifully low utilization he was currently experiencing was costing him greatly. When I asked him what his approach was going to be it became obvious to me that he couldnt succeed. His approach was to combine applications onto servers that had sufficient CPU horsepower. But I asked him a couple of simple questions. What about the applications storage requirements? How can you make changes to your applications and servers without understanding the impact on your shared storage pool. A light bulb went off for the customer. He realized I was right. He couldnt accomplish his mission without taking that holistic view. Everything is interconnected. Changing servers has a great impact on the underlying storage system and vice versa. This was now a great time to talk with him about Akorris BalancePoint product. I quickly told him that BalancePoint creates the Cross-Domain view he’d need and provide the analysis and modeling required to do the job efficiently.

What was it that Lincoln said? “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” While there’s certainly a place for storage management systems, they are not the panacea as they have often been portrayed. Without a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and a good understanding of the increasingly complex relationship between storage, applications, operating systems and servers, troubleshooting problems will continue to be an exercise in finger pointing.