InfoVista Enables Organizations to Achieve Full Benefits of Virtualization

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, May 21 2007

Paris, France and Herndon, VA and Las Vegas, NV – May 21, 2007 – InfoVista (Euronext IFV - FR0004031649), the leading service-centric performance management software vendor, announced today the release of VistaInsight® for Servers 3.0, its solution for managing next generation data centers.  With this release, InfoVista applies its proven performance management technology to help customers achieve maximum gain from virtualization technology and avoid its potential pitfalls, offering the most scalable solution for heterogeneous server farms – both physical and virtual.

“Virtualization promises to alleviate many of the pressures facing data center managers as they use it to cut costs, enable disaster recovery, reduce power consumption and streamline application deployment,” said George Hamilton, director, Enabling Technologies  Enterprise Group, Yankee Group.  “However, in a large environment without the right management tools, virtualization adds complexity that can erode potential cost-savings and pose new operational challenges.  Determining what to virtualize is not a trivial task; it’s even more challenging to ensure that when moving a virtual machine from one server to another, you’re not interrupting the quality of critical services.” 

VistaInsight for Servers 3.0 helps companies know what servers to virtualize, correlates the virtual machines to the physical machines they reside on, and enables pro-active response to problems in the data center before end-users are impacted.  The solution collects and stores data from hundreds or thousands of servers into one unified view and provides visibility into end-to-end services by collecting information on not only the servers, but the surrounding network infrastructure, including switches, firewalls and load balancers.

The fact that most data centers are highly heterogeneous environments poses particular challenges for virtualization.  Knowing what resources can be consolidated rests on having a “normalized” view of server assets – having apples-to-apples utilization and saturation comparisons between different hardware platforms running different operating systems, agents and virtualization software. 

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VistaInsight for Servers 3.0 is also used to provide reports to executives, application teams and line-of-business managers for proactive purposes; it depicts trends, predicts when servers and devices will be unable to respond to user demand, and enables accurate planning for growth. Reports provide pre- and post-virtualization performance data for fine tuning ongoing consolidation strategies and provide granular drill downs for data center operations support. 

VistaInsight for Servers 3.0 delivers the following key functionality:

• Embedded support for Windows Messaging Interface, Solaris DTrace and VMWare API to enable companies to migrate toward agentless monitoring.
• Embedded support for industry-standard agents (BMC Patrol, IBM SSM, NetSNMP, HP SIM) enabling aggregated views across heterogeneous server platforms.
• Built-in support for common virtualization platforms including VMWare ESX and Solaris Containers.
• Cross-domain coverage of the data center, providing a unified view across servers, networks, firewalls, load balancers and applications.  This enables data center managers to quickly identify the silo responsible for service degradation and adopt preemptive measures.
• Flexible, secure, business- and service-oriented reporting, delivering relevant data to any constituent – end-user, executive, line of business owner, IT manager or operator.
• Exceptional scalability and analytics­.  VistaInsight for Servers and its underlying platform scales to match the largest data centers, proven in an environment of tens of thousands of servers and over a thousand report end-users. 

In addition, InfoVista is market-leading in the incorporation of Sun’s new DTrace technology into a performance management framework.  DTrace was introduced into the Solaris operating system to manage applications and servers for both physical and virtual environments (see release “InfoVista Leverages Sun Solaris 10 System and Application Visibility for Data Center Virtualization” also issued today).

“Our customers have long benefited from the capacity planning, trouble shooting and reporting that VistaInsight for Servers provides,” said Manuel Stopnicki, chief technology officer, InfoVista.  “As they take the next step toward data center transformation, our new release offers a vendor-agnostic solution designed for heterogeneous data center environments that optimizes server performance for physical, virtual and hybrid infrastructures.  With VistaInsight for Servers 3.0, we help our customers control spiraling hardware- and facilities-related costs and create a predictable environment for future growth.”

VistaInsight for Servers 3.0 is currently in beta testing and will be previewed at Interop Las Vegas, May 20-25, at Booth 367.  The solution will be available for deployment starting the third quarter of calendar year 2007.  InfoVista offers a reseller channel program and invites participation from companies focused on data center and server deployment services.

About InfoVista
InfoVista is the Service-Centric Performance Management Software Company that assures the optimal delivery of business-critical IT services.  Driven by a uniquely adaptive and real-time technology foundation, InfoVista solutions improve business effectiveness, reduce operating risk, lower cost of operations, increase agility and create competitive advantage.  Eighty percent of the world's largest service providers as ranked by Fortune®, as well as leading Global 2000 enterprises, rely on InfoVista to enhance the business value of their technology assets. Representative customers include Bell Canada, Bharti, BNP Paribas, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Colt, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Deloitte & Touche, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Natexis, Savvis Corporation, SingTel, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Telstra and Voca.  A Software Magazine 500 company, InfoVista stock is traded on the Eurolist by Euronext (FR0004031649).  For more information about the company, please visit www.infovista.com.