He listed Akorri in the “Service & Capacity Management” category along with a few other vendors. In this list, Akorri BalancePoint is the only analytics-based solution for server to storage performance analysis and capacity planning for both physical and virtual environments.

We’ve long held that solutions that can understand interdependencies across all layers of the infrastructure and bring sophisticated correlation engines to the table will pave the way to the future of the next generation data center. Such tools are simply a key component of the management layer required in an increasingly complex, dense, consolidated, virtualized, and ever-changing data center.

Today, BalancePoint, plugged into VMware’s vCenter management console, reaches well beyond any virtual or physical data center silo, and paints a picture of end to end infrastructure performance, predicting performance issues, avoiding outages, and optimizing utilization for total data center visibility.

For more information about BalancePoint visit: www.akorri.com/video

If you’re managing performance of the virtual machines and the physical machines separately it can make you feel like you have two jobs.  Who has time for that? 

What’s needed is a solution that handles both and can provide the following:

• A metric that proves your VMs always perform optimally using minimal server and storage resources.
• Measure and record the round trip response time of your virtual infrastructure? (virtual/physical; storage/server)
• Alarms that isolate specific applications that have poor performance due to disk contention
• A topology map that automatically discovers and displays I/O paths through virtual and physical servers and storage

Learn how you can get that combination.  Watch this video.

Many conferences have a hard time finding customers willing to present their story even though they are typically the most well received sessions.  There are several case study sessions to vote for in the Virtualization 101 track including one from SandRidge Energy (Session ID: V18113). 

Sandridge Energy is a natural gas and oil company headquartered in Oklahoma City.  They were challenged by some mounting performance problems and needed visibility into their virtual and physical environment including storage and how everything worked together.  Vote for this session to learn how they were able to get immediate insight and improve efficiency end to end.  You can read more about them now here. 

There are 8 tracks and you can vote as many times as you like in each track, but only once per session.  If you like a session, just click on the ‘thumbs up’, but you have to be logged in.  So if you don’t already have a vmworld.com accout you have to create one at www.vmworld.com/login.jspa

Get out the vote and hear from your peers.

• Many are into “phase 2” of their VMware deployments
• A majority were running around 60 guest on 5 – 10 ESX servers
• They were looking to move to virtualize “tougher applications” like SQL, Oracle, SAP
• They had a mix mash of different storage
• Still fighting budget battles; looking to move projects along this summer
• 99% using VMware with a small percent using Hyper-v and VMware, and even smaller percent that were Hyper-v only
• Many were looking for partners to help them with capacity planning

What I found most striking was that the cost savings messages we had been hearing from end users in the States for the past year, were the same there.  Some of the things I kept hearing were:

• “I need to do more with less.”
• “I need to add servers without adding head count.”
• “I have more storage but no visibility.”
• “How do we account for all of this?”

Obviously we were happy to talk to these folks about how BalancePoint has been helping customers in the States for years solve these problems.

Cloudy with a Chance of Skepticism

Pretty much unanimously they were tired of hearing about cloud.  In fact, I heard a funny story while I was there.  Apparently, Ireland’s Department of Finance from the Chief State Solicitor’s Office spoke out saying that you shouldn’t use a cloud of any type.  I guess someone didn’t get the memo that clouds can be private or public nor read the article (below) about the local investment in public cloud infrastructure before making his statement.

Both IBM and Hewlett Packard have established cloud computing competency centres in Ireland which created 190 jobs and involve a combined investment of €36 million. Microsoft, which is identified in the e-mail as a cloud computing supplier, invested $500 million (€366 million) in building a data centre in Dublin which opened last year and will provide these services.

Attending this event just proved to me that IT is the same around the world, just at varying stages, and that all governments can say things with unintended circumstances.

My thoughts are this.  The Ionix deal went a long way to ensuring that EMC and VMware will not overlap or compete in the management arena as VMware transitions from a hypervisor company to a virtual server and application management company.

What I find very interesting is that this now disconnects the server and storage domains.  If you know Akorri , we’re all about servers and storage, or what we call cross-domain.  Now I am sure there will be overlap within the EMC and VMware portfolios in the future (probably on purpose).  Perhaps one will  leave off or even hand off to the other’s management software.  So does this mean you will need a multi-vendor solution for cloud and virtualization infrastructure management?  I argue yes.

What’s the likely overlap?  I’m thinking SMARTS ADM / APPSPEED and the rest of the SMARTS family.  Almost instantly APPSPEED becomes a formidable APM management platform.  No longer just being J2EE application mapping and performance.  Now it can start to competing with the likes of HP BAC, Dynatrace, AppDynamics,  Bluestripe, Solarwinds, and many more.

As Chad states in his blog on the subject, cross licensing and integration among the software vendors has happened for many years – especially the cross-licensing / OEM’ing of SMARTS by Cisco and others to improve their correlation and event management.

So what does this mean to the customers?  I really don’t think it changes too much in the way the products operate today.  In the future will they become more VMWare specific?  Doubtful.  In fact this could be very positive for the development of the software.  Moving from inside a hardware-come-software-company-lately to a pure software company may bring life and future development focus to the products. 

At the end of the day the winner seems to be VMware in this.  I think for EMC it is a push given the development money spent over the years, the rebranding, and the acquisition costs.  Customers may win too – but we will have to see.

I don’t think it’s necessarily “moving deck chairs on the titanic” but I do think that it draws a line in the sand for the companies and reveals where they are not going to compete.

This video presentation is a nice round up of the challenges, current state of virtualization, future plans and recommendations for solving the management conundrum.

A fact I found interesting is that one recent IDC market survey indicates that close to 80 percent of all organizations grappling with more than 50 virtual machines are planning to apply some sort of management discipline to the mix. I think any organization deploying virtualization should be considering a management solution even before virtualizing.  It’s an opportunity to baseline performance of your physically hosted applications before you virtualize so you can show you’re still delivering good application performance after vritualization.  It can also ward off some of the challenges later by putting performance metrics in place from the beginning.

Heather highlights the fact that virtual and physical servers are co-existing in the State of Affairs in the slide below.  This is something Akorri has recognized from the beginning and why BalancePoint monitors both virtual and physical servers as well as the storage environment together to give you control of the complete infrastructure.

Heather Clancy's Virtualization State of Affairs

So if you’re trying to figure out how virtual infrastructure management will fit into your overall services mix, check out this presentation.  You can also read Heather’s blog here.  Enjoy!

 
Optimize While You Virtualize to Get to the Cloud
— Virtualization is the key technology for the cloud. Its ability to separate the OS and application from the hardware enable it to best deliver on-demand cloud services. Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT, said it best: “Without virtualization there is no cloud – that’s what enabled the emergence of this new, sustainable industry.” But, how can IT organizations leverage virtualization to create their own private cloud?

One of the major themes was around how to virtualize mission-critical apps.  Two of the vendors gave presentations on this topic – one sharing the results of a test environments running a large Exchange environment and the other talking about the strategy behind getting there. 

Dave Vellante with Wikibon blogged about the other major themes – consolidation ratios, storage, back up and security.  I’d be interested to learn whether these are the top topics on your mind. 

Overall a great event. Looking forward to attending the next one.

In the article, Dan asks what products were considered to help take virtualization to the next level and I thought Kevin’s response was great, so wanted to share it here.

No single product was compared which was a driver in selecting BalancePoint. We had several tools already, Microsoft MOM, VEEAM Report and other tools, Hardware Vendor tools and MS SQL tools.
IT was taking a full arsenal of tools and a team of people to try and get to a common conclusion on what was happening within the system. BalancePoint was picked because it was a common tool for diverse teams to use and get a collective answer.
The fingers could then point to the problem instead of each other.

In talking with our customers, a recurring theme is the need to tie together the virtual and physical worlds of their infrastructure and it’s great to hear that BalancePoint is being used as a tool to help teams better communicate, collaborate and manage service delivery.

You can read the entire post here. If you are a BalancePoint customer and would like to share your story, please contact me.

Report: 451 Market Insight Service
Analyst: Dennis Callaghan
Date: August 21, 2009

Event summary

Virtual infrastructure management specialist Akorri reports 160% growth in its customer base in the first half of this year over 2008. It had 120 customers at the end of June and is on track to add 30-40 more in the third quarter.

The company has extended its BalancePoint virtualized datacenter management software with a number of new metrics for both virtual and physical IT servers and storage.

Akorri has signed a number of key partnerships with other vendors that should help it reach new customers, and it has been busy filling out its management team with experienced software executives.

The 451 take
Akorri is clearly a company on the upswing, with impressive growth, an extending reach and new, experienced executives who know the virtualization space. In a hotly competitive space, it seems to have a plan and a technology message that’s resonating. With one product and a focus on analytics, Akorri already looked like a takeover target for a larger IT management software firm. With the traction it’s getting in the market and the reach it’s developing, its success may be hard for the larger players to ignore too much longer.

Details
Akorri has all the appearances of a company on the upswing. It reported 160% growth in the first half of this year, finishing the period with 120 customers – and it expects to have between 150 and 160 customers by the end of this quarter. The company continues to extend its flagship BalancePoint offering, which manages performance of virtual servers and storage.
The latest features in the 3.0 release are a virtual machine performance index to gauge performance of individual virtual machines to size them properly for the applications that will reside on them; virtual resource entitlement analysis, which demonstrates actual virtual resource usage vs. allocation; and Microsoft and VMware cluster support. There is also virtual CPU efficiency analysis and SAN switch performance analysis, for Brocade and Cisco SAN switches. Akorri is transitioning BalancePoint’s architecture from Java to Adobe Flex for the sake of better performance.

Akorri has been active on the partnership front, signing up several resellers this year, including one in Japan, and adding Avnet Technology Solutions as a distributor.

BalancePoint has become a part of Avnet’s VirtualPath virtual infrastructure management offerings. Storage software developer.  Datalink is a new technology partner, releasing its Virtual Infrastructure Services offering powered by BalancePoint. Akorri continues to work closely with VMware, announcing support for VMware’s vSphere cloud operating system by the end of this year.

Earlier this summer, Akorri expanded its management team, adding Bill Simpson, a veteran software executive who most recently ran channels and strategy at Virtual Iron Software, as VP of worldwide sales, and former Virtual Iron sales executive Warren Mead as VP of worldwide channels. Jim Comstock, who was most recently director of SAN strategy at NetApp, joined Akorri as VP of business development.

Competitive landscape
Akorri is pushing advanced analytics for virtualized environments rather than just straight-up performance monitoring, an area where Cirba and ToutVirtual are also trying to stake out ground. Novell, through its acquisition of PlateSpin, and vKernel are also challengers here. Server and application performance analytics specialists like Netuitive and Integrien have expanded into virtual environments as well. Other companies in the physical/virtual datacenter performance management space include Nimsoft, ScienceLogic, EG Innovations, Uptime Software, Perfman and BlueStripe Software, all of which have at least some analytics capabilities, although their positioning is not quite the same as Akorri’s, which is as much about resource utilization and migration issues as tracking performance bottlenecks. All of these vendors of course have to prove their value as performance management tools above and beyond VMware’s vCenter. All of the Big Four (HP, IBM, CA Inc and BMC) have some capabilities for both performance monitoring and analysis that can be applied to virtual environments, although it’s enough of a niche for startups to exploit and outmaneuver larger companies in, especially at a lower price point, and Akorri offers a pay-as-you-go plan for BalancePoint.

Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; copyright 2009. This report was originally published within The 451 Group’s Market Insight Service.