Dan's Take

Taming Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Xangati Offers Tools for the multi-cloud enterprise.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 04/26/2016

Xangati is one of a number of suppliers offering tools designed to provide intelligent performance management of workloads running in virtual computing environments. Its goals are to make it possible for IT administrators to both see what's happening across the enterprise IT infrastructure as well as peak into the nooks and crannies of multiple cloud service offerings.

Xangati's tools are meant to provide visibility into things such as how well the infrastructure's performing (which, of course directly affects application performance); what's impacting end-user experience; whether the infrastructure's being utilized properly; whether the infrastructure need to be expanded to meet the requirements of enterprise workloads; how well the infrastructure's set up to provide high levels of availability and mitigate risk; and how well these factors relate to the enterprise's goals for ROI.

What's New?
Here's a snippet of a press release discussing some new features:

• Xangati launched four new ESP extensions to its best-in-class monitoring solution: NVIDIA physical GPU, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Docker, in which Xangati’s virtual appliance software correlates real-time data across on-premise virtualization, containers and public clouds.


• The Xangati ESP Extension for NVIDIA pGPU empowers cloud workspace system administrators with deep visibility into the performance of XenServer’s hypervisor pGPU utilization. Sysadmins can now optimize their pGPU resources by visualizing per-VM and percentage utilization metrics of pGPU, memory and frame buffers, and ensure optimal performance for VDI graphics acceleration.

Dan's Take: It's a Multi-Cloud World
Xangati, like a number of suppliers of performance monitoring and management products, has come to understand that enterprises are increasingly deploying a multi-cloud, hybrid strategy in their attempts to create an IT infrastructure that's agile, reliable, performs well and meets enterprise cost and ROI goals. This usually means using a mix of on-premises and off-premise systems. It also typically means using many different cloud services to optimize the enterprise IT environment. Large enterprises are also using this strategy to manage their cloud service providers.

Some vendors of converged systems offer designs that tend to lock workloads in. This means that workloads executing in their environments are tied to the vendor's systems. This can get in the way of application mobility and agility, so enterprises that wish to design and implement an availability strategy that depends upon workload mobility might find it difficult. Because of this, enterprises should be aware of these subtle lock-ins and avoid them. Having a strategy and an architecture that makes it possible to deploy systems from many different suppliers would be wise.

It also gives IT shops leverage when negotiating with the cloud service providers, enabling questions like, "Service provider X is giving us a better deal. What are you going to do to keep us on your platform?"

Xangati's tools appear to offer IT administrators the tools they need to monitor a complex, ever-changing computing environment, and provide the data needed to effectively negotiate with cloud service providers.