Hyper9: Search Meets Virtualization Management
If management and automation is the new battleground for virtualization, then it will be interesting to see where the innovation comes from in this area. The large system vendors have the advantage of a huge installed base of physical management offerings but at the same time are saddled with limitation of having to innovate incrementally “at the edges” of their existing products via release upgrades.
On the other hand, a company like HP has its hooks into just about every aspect of the next generation data center and is in a great position to leverage the increasingly de-siloed and virtualized components of server, storage, network, and applications and to aggregate individual console feeds into the much vaunted “single pane of glass”. And just for the record, although the largely unattainable but desirable “single pane of glass” goal gets invoked by just about every management vendor we speak to, we’re a long way from this becoming a reality. In fact, I invite you to consider that the problem will get worse before it gets better as we in many cases add yet another management layer just for virtual systems.
That said, it’s worth taking a look at some of the start-ups out there trying to innovate. Given the complexity involved, ease of use and elegantly simplified presentation of real-time and historical data is going to be at the heart of the evolving dynamic data center. One of the companies working this problem is Hyper9. The company is based in Austin, Texas, privately held, and backed by Matrix Partners and Silverton Partners.
Editor Keith Ward and I recently spoke with Chris Ostertag, President and CEO and Dave McCrory, CTO. Hyper9 has two innovation plays. First, the product is being offered as freeware with optional value-add modules available as it moves along its roadmap development. Second, to reduce the complexity that virtualization introduces, the value prop is centered on a “Google-like” search engine as opposed to the classic hunt and find logic tree approach. The initial virtual appliance works in the VMware ESX environment and later versions will work with other hypervisors.
Is search the future of virtualization management? Send an email and let me know your thoughts.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/18/2008 at 10:28 AM