Akorri Named in Gartner Cool Vendor Report
Gartner recently released it’s Cool Vendor Report in Server Virtualization Management and Akorri was named one of the Cool Vendors in this space. I’m excited about our company being recognized as a "cool vendor" in this emerging space.
It’s clear to me that Gartner understands that the Virtualized Data Center requires a new paradigm when it comes to managing this dynamic infrastructure. A quote from their Key Findings points this out.
The ease with which virtual machines (VMs) can be created and/or removed as well as dynamically relocated is calling into question the capabilities of many traditional management tools that were not originally designed for this environment.
In the report Cameron Haight states that one of the challenges he sees for Akorri is
Akorri’s most direct competitor was a recent introduction by Onaro, which was recently acquired by NetApp, and the combination of these two companies may provide the means to potentially cut into Akorri’s technology lead.
I don’t really understand this since Onaro and Akorri provide solutions in very different spaces. See my previous post on this topic.
Shortly before the acquisition, Onaro started talking about providing a solution called VM Insight. From looking at their website it seems to me that what VM Insight does is that it pulls statistics from VMware Virtual Center and redisplays those stats in their GUI. It seems that is a popular thing to do these days. Another vendor, VKernel, announced that they were going to provide a product that does the same thing. It’s not clear to me what value that really brings to customers since all that information is obviously available in Virtual Center. In VKernels case they can’t even provide a cross domain view. The only visibility they have is what Virtual Center provides to them.
Akorri’s BalancePoint on the other hand collects information from the Database, Server, Switch, and Storage layers and uses that information in it’s Analytics and Queuing Model Engines to give customers a detailed analysis of what’s going on with their systems. Other than seeing the complete system it’s hard, if not impossible, to provide information that will allow customers to effectively manage their virtualized data center.
