Search-Based Management by Hyper9

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, November 24 2008

BR: Hyper9 is a private company based in Austin, Texas, and we’re focused on providing systems management solutions to the virtualization industry. Our solution is unique as it employs a search platform, a Web 2.0-style interface, and maintains an ongoing history of key management data. Specifically, I’m talking about configuration, performance, state, event data, et cetera. We just launched a private beta program on October 1 that consists of 100 companies and we plan to make our solution generally available in January.

BR: Basically time-to-action. The amount of time it takes a systems administrator to analyze a situation and determine the appropriate management action is extremely high in a virtualized environment for several reasons:

 

First of all, admins are locked into what they affectionately refer to as “console hell.” To analyze a single issue, most of our beta participants have to open 20-40 consoles at one time. Second, existing management tools utilize a traditional hierarchical view which limits visibility and makes it very difficult to navigate the infrastructure. Third, because these disparate utilities and consoles are not integrated, admins are forced to use manual spreadsheets to maintain their environments. As a result, it’s not possible to automatically correlate relevant information that’s scattered. So the burden of correlation is forced on the admin, and therefore the risk of making a change that breaks something is high, good reporting is not possible, and it’s just very difficult and, in fact, too expensive to automate.

BR: Again, it’s back to time-to-action and there are several ways that we minimize that – specifically the amount of time it takes an admin to analyze the situation, and then determine what management action to take. First of all, I’d like to talk about the interactive nature of Search. Data fuels analysis and because analysis is a series of questions and lines of interrogations, the interactive nature of Search is a natural fit. Particularly when all these different types of management data are collected and indexed across all layers of the stack, meaning the physical hardware, operating system, hypervisor, guest operating system, application, services, et cetera. With a search platform, a single question can be posed within a search bar, by specifying multiple data-type combinations, values, and thresholds. With the right type of data aggregation strategy, the user interface begs to become a single pane of glass that’s used to drive analytic activities. This is not surprising, given that the hardest and most time-consuming part of administrative scenarios is in evaluating the risks associated with performing an action, not performing the action itself.

 

Second, traditional management tools force admins into particular roles with constrained paths of exploration and analysis. Static UIs are presented in a standard tree-oriented format where the detail associated with the infrastructure objects is limited. So it’s a one-way-fits-all and vendors-know-best approach that doesn’t scale in dynamic environments – even the small to medium sized ones. In contrast, a search paradigm embraces free-form thinking and individual problem solving preferences. A dynamic user interface returns rich information collections that everyone recognizes as familiar search result sets. Every result set that’s returned is relevant to the current and previous lines of interrogation. More and more irrelevant data is filtered until the appropriate action is revealed. Hence, the entire experience is very fluid and interactive for the admin.

 

The final point I would make is what I call “no boundaries.” Traditional enterprise systems management solutions are organized around a particular type of management data. For example, there are configuration management solutions, performance management solutions, monitoring, alerting and so forth. As a result, the admin is challenged to mentally correlate information across these domains, to support their troubleshooting, provisioning, consolidation initiatives, et cetera. Conversely, a search paradigm has the unique advantage of being cross-disciplined out of the box because Search is inherently a data integration platform. It can easily gather and index data of all types, from different sources, and be leveraged to provide dynamic cross sections of data in a way that accelerates analysis and leads to quicker management action.

BR: Well, since our inception we’ve been intent on serving virtual infrastructure administrators. These are the people that do the day-to-day work of building and operating and maintaining virtual infrastructures. Before we wrote the first line of code, we did an extensive amount of market research, which meant interacting with these guys to understand their most pressing needs. So I think we’ve done a good job of aligning our solution with the key pain points that occur on a daily basis.

 

That said, I think our solution has been well received because it combines Search with a Web 2.0-style interface to offer a rich interactive user experience. It’s fun, exciting and it yields immediate value. The solution can be installed and running within 30 minutes, and the intuitive nature of Search enables admins to understand our product’s value proposition within minutes and to realize value in less than an hour.

 

Finally, our marketing approach has been to build industry support from the ground up in a viral way. The admin community is tightly knit, as you know, and the fact is that we’ve acquired most of our customer traction via word-of-mouth in the admin community.

BR: Again, one of the most exciting things about Search is that it facilitates a rich, interactive experience with the user who enters a question into the search bar, and then evaluates the answers that are served up as a set of search results. The question can be refined and asked again or a totally different question can be asked and the cycle is repeated until the desired result or result set is attained. Even when the questions are tough, Search offers a simple way to ask complex questions, particularly when you employ a natural language search paradigm. So for the admin, asking questions via natural language and regular expressions in a search bar easily trumps complex SQL queries or interacting with dozens of management consoles. More questions can be asked, more answers can be attained faster, and at the same time, bad answers can be proactively eliminated via facets or filters, keywords, and search hint techniques. Finally, this interactive, engagement model provides instant gratification by giving admins the data that’s relevant to the situation at hand so they can determine what they’re going to do, that is what management action they’re going to perform.

BR: Well, the current version of the Hyper9 product focuses on organizing all virtual infrastructure data to make it useful and instantly accessible. We’re basically streamlining the analysis process. In the near future, we will be unveiling additional features and some integration with key industry partners that’s going to enable seamless execution of management actions – workflows and so forth – from our interface.

BR: There’s a lot of ways to answer that question, but I think it’s clear that the IT industry has embraced virtualization as the technology that will be used to abstract applications and services from physical hardware and operating systems. I think at some point the same type of transformation will occur inside of the virtual machine at which point the application gets to drive the operating system, instead of the operating system driving the application. This implies more efficient, customizable operating systems, and, in my view, finally offers a practical way to achieve a utility computing paradigm. And yes, there’s a long tail on this as its going to take several more years to achieve, but I think this is going to happen.

BR: The best way to learn about Hyper9 is to join the Hyper9 community and you can do that by going to www.hyper9.com . Not only can you stay abreast of the latest developments from the Web, but you can actively participate in discussions with Hyper9 beta customers that are actively using the product, and you can interact directly with Hyper9 product developers and the rest of the team.

Related Links:

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