Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Managing Virtualization on MSPtv

By Lisa Crewe

I just watched a new program from MSPtv called “Around the Channel.”  This month the topic is Managing Virtualization with special guest, Heather Clancy, a business journalist we’ve had several conversations with over the past year including a recent discussion on virtualization management.

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

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!

February 22, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

From Virtualization to Cloud Computing: Are You Ready?

By Rob Strechay

If you’re thinking about deploying an internal cloud for your organization then you might find this article interesting. The article explains the three stages of virtualization from Akorri’s perspective based on our work with customers including the evolution and steps to take to assure performance and manage service levels.  This is good stuff to use when you are going between the reality of deploying virtualization and the hype of cloud.  It may give you a few good ideas on line items for your resume too … as you are now a “Cloud Architect” … check it out.

 
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?

February 16, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

New England VMware Users Group

By Lisa Crewe

Akorri was a sponsor of the New England VMware Users Group “Winter Warmer” last week.  It was extremely well attended with more than 800 people there. 

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.

January 31, 2010 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

A customer perspective on infrastructure optimization

By Lisa Crewe

One of Akorri’s customers, Kevin Brown, Infrastructure Manager with Service Corporation International, was nice enough to share his virtualization experiences with Daniel Kusnetzky of The 451 Group for his blog on ZDNet.

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.

November 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

Akorri makes aggressive moves, continues on growth

By Lisa Crewe

The 451 Group recently published a report on Akorri’s recent BalancePoint 3.0 and company progress that I feel is worth sharing. I’ve included the entire article here for your reading pleasure.

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.

    October 22, 2009 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

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