Intigua Virtualizes Agent Management
"I hate agents!"
This is the well used mantra of Shimon Hason, CEO of Intigua, whose company has just announced the GA of Intigua Systems Management Virtualization, which eliminates nefarious agent management challenges and costs plaguing IT, supplanting them with many of the finer cloud qualities like scalability, simplicity, and robust functionality.
To Hason, virtualization is the anti-agent, the low-touch solution, not the expensive, time-consuming, hands-on approach. Intigua virtualizes a wide range of third-party system management tools, such as monitoring, antivirus, configuration management and backup, while automating physical and virtual management tasks. Toward that end, the company provides a centralized dashboard to help users defined their system management policies. "Now you can virtualize your network and storage," he states.
He condemns system management solutions that require agents to be intrusively installed on every end-point machine, which renders them incapable of properly supporting complex, large-scale environments. He claims that the expenses associated with agents are so out of control that in one case, it took over a year and $5 million to upgrade a single one.
According to a company press release, "Intigua utilizes the same core principles that have been so successful in server and application virtualization. It creates virtual versions of existing systems management agents, called vAgents, that are decoupled from the machines they manage, yet provide the same functionality as an installed agent."
The Systems Management Virtualization's central console and automation capabilities expedites the entire agent lifecycle, by automatically pushing out new or upgraded vAgents to virtual, physical and cloud-based machines.
Jerry Nelson, Sr., Manager, Intlel Systems, at customer Open Solutions, is a happy user, declaring, "Managing agents was very time-consuming and disruptive, and the agents were consuming too much CPU, causing key applications to crash. This was unacceptable for a private cloud financial software company like ours. With Intigua, we can finally run agents without worrying about cumbersome maintenance or performance issues."
Hason is a veritable trove of bad news agent stories, saying for instance, that "Every day three to five percent of your agents stop for some reason," requiring users to touch their machines manually. The cloud means automation and low touch. Agents are a pain to manage throughout their lifecycles."
Intigua pricing begins at $75 per VM per year.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/13/2012 at 12:48 PM