Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Vote for Akorri for Virtualization Journal’s 2009 “Readers’ Choice Awards”

By Lisa Crewe

Akorri is nominated for Virtualization Journal’s 2009 “Readers’ Choice Awards.” The Reader’s Choice Awards recognize excellence in the Virtualization software, solutions or services provided by the industry’s top vendors.

Akorri is nominated in three categories:

o Best Virtualization Management Tools
o Best Virtualization Platforms Capacity Planning
o Best Virtualization Platforms Monitoring & Reporting

Please take the time to vote for Akorri.

Voting ends October 23 and the winners will be announced the week of November 2-4, 2009, at the “SOA in the Cloud” which is part of SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. Thank you so much for your support of Akorri!

October 20, 2009 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Akorri News & Opinion, Industry News & Opinion | Leave a Comment 

The world does not revolve around VMWare!

By Rob Strechay

You know VMware is the 800 lb Gorilla in hypervisors, but there are others, citrix xen, IBM Lpars, Hp Npars, Sun Zones, and Microsoft Hyper-v (stop laughing this is serious).

I am going to let you in on a little secret. The Hypervisor is a commodity. What you are paying for are the software services on top of them. Yes you can argue some have more bells and whistles in the hypervisor, scale differently, support different OS’s better than others, or are cheaper. What you are paying for is the right to buy the software add-ons.

It will be interesting to see how each differentiates from each other over the next year. Who will say performance matters and deliver on service level guarantees? Which one will be the most cloud-ish? Will you care?

I think you will care, but I believe the one that builds the most complete eco-system will win. I believe it is like email wars; exchange vs notes. Most companies use exchange. Not because it has more bells and whistles or is the best “all-in-one” product. But because it is a very effective email and calendaring system. Where Lotus Notes was trying to be everything collaborative … MS gave you the options to pick off the Chinese food menu at a reasonable price.

Same will happen with hypervisors. You’re going to have the “all in one” vs the one with features core to the hypervisor (performance / stability) …

I would say the one place MS and others have never done well is management beyond fault and event. So who will be the differentiator in this space? Will it be build or buy? Who will care that not all the workloads will live in virtualized / cloud environments … many with the label of “business critical”?

I believe you will be looking once again for “best of breed” products. Products that were not meant to be panaceas or “single-panes-of-glass” but never got implemented. In my time in the IT industry I have seen people buy five or more single-panes and still never achieve any benefit. Like in the storage industry you will probably buy your element/fault management from the vender and get the rest from innovative vendors outside those vendors.

Editorial Note:
Recently some of the aforementioned hypervisor vendors have been saying they will provide you everything for your data center an even cook you breakfast in the morning. Most call this the “cloud” strategy. Clouds where you use the “services” … think web services … available. Problem is that you will not be able to simply write to one API can move workloads between “clouds”. For clouds, cloud suppliers, and such to be successful this will need to become reality. Supplying underlying infrastructure services with no easy way to write to them is only part of what would be a dramatic game changer. This is not to say “private clouds” in our IT shops will work, but leveraging “public cloud providers” will be difficult.

July 6, 2009 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | 4 Comments 

ESG Reviews Akorri’s BalancePoint Suite

By Rich Corley

Last week the analysts at ESG published their results from tests they ran on Akorri’s BalancePoint product.  You can download a copy of their report from here.

The guys from ESG were great. It’s clear they’ve done this before!  They showed up at the Akorri facililty in the early morning and wanted to do everything from the initial plug in of the appliance to running the most advanced analysis the product offers. Of course Murphy did have to raise his ugly head and when they plugged in the appliance it tripped a circuit breaker. Lesson learned! It’s not a good idea to plug the appliance into an outlet that already has a storage array, switch, and a few servers already plugged into it.

August 21, 2007 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update | Leave a Comment 

Gartner’s IT Infrastructure and Operations Show

By Rich Corley

Ok, I know its been a long time between postings but its been a real hectic summer! June was filled with industry shows and customer meetings along with closing business for our Q2.  July hasnt been any less hectic.  The main focus for us in July has been the introduction of our latest release of BalancePoint, V1.7.   This release enhances our support for virtualization technology from VMWare and Hitachi.  It also adds support for NetApps Fiber Channel and iSCSI interfaces.

I did take a week off in July to vacation with my family at Sunset Beach, NC.  My wife might disagree though that I actually was on vacation since my cell phone was on constantly.  If you like warm water and nice sandy beaches Id highly recommend this place. Theres really nothing more to do than sit on the beach and soak up the sun, unless of course youre back at the cottage on your cell phone!  I promised her that next year I wouldnt bring it!

One of the best trade shows for Akorri this year was the Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations & Management show held back in mid June.  Our booth was over-flowing with interested attendees and our VP of Marketing, Tom Joyce, gave a talk on virtualization best practices that was very well attended.  You can see Toms presentation here.

The point of Toms presentation was to say that if you have one or more of the 2.3 million virtual servers that IDC estimates were deployed in 2006 or if you belong to one of the 76% of enterprises that plan to deploy virtualization within the next year then you need to think about how you are going to plan, deploy, and manage that infrastructure.  First and foremost youll need to look at your entire virtual infrastructure as a complete system.  Youll need cross-domain analysis, an understanding of your infrastructures performance not just component level performance, youll need to understand how virtualization makes everything shared and that sharing causes contention points and hot spots, and youll need to understand how to dynamically load balance your infrastructure in order to meet performance and availability metrics.

If you are serious about deploying a virtual infrastructure then give thought not only to which virtualization vendor you are going to deploy but how you are going to manage that infrastructure in the long run.

July 31, 2007 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update | Leave a Comment 

Is SMI dead or just in the Trough of Disillusionment?

By Rich Corley

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.

April 12, 2007 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Akorri News & Opinion, Customer Experiences | Leave a Comment 

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