Akorri User Digs Deep
The more companies adopt virtualization, the more they need to understand what is going on behind the scenes in their virtualized environments. That need is driving the growth of companies like Akorri, which is currently touting its success with Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), the world's largest provider of diesel-electric locomotives.
According to Bill Bradford, EMD Global Director of Infrastructure and Applications, the company did an infrastructure refresh of its storage, servers and networks in 2007 as part of its commitment to a server virtualization strategy that includes 90 percent of all the company's servers. Bradford says EMD was able to get between 10 and 30 VMs per physical host, which was good, but all that VM density made it difficult to monitor and maintain available storage and server resources.
"People were having a hard time getting reports to answer their questions," Bradford says.
All that has changed now that EMD has implemented Akorri's BalancePoint software, which Akorri claims is "the only analytics-based IT management software solution on the market designed to optimize performance and utilization of virtual machines, physical servers and storage resources." The Akorri product is agentless and can be purchased as a virtual appliance. It provides multi-vendor, heterogeneous support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, and is compatible with major storage vendors such as EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell 3PAR, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems and Dell EqualLogic.
Rather than conduct a formal search to meet its product research needs, Bradford says "We just asked around and Akorri is what came back. We put it in and sure enough it told us how many virtual servers were being used. It makes it very easy for us to display analytic reports." In addition, he adds, the package enables tech people to dig down in CPU, storage and I/O levels, allowing them to tweak those levels as required. EMD now gets weekly storage utilization reports that help the company tighten up its IT performance.
Although EMD has not measured a hard-dollar ROI figure, Bradford says that with BalancePoint, he has saved some $250,000 that would have otherwise been spent on additional storage resources. "We like the tool," he says. "We're not looking for anything else right now."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/02/2010 at 12:48 PM