A Management System Wish List

As you can imagine, we have a lot of discussions with virtualization management vendors of all stripes. I tend to find startups especially intriguing since many of them have a particular value proposition that they’re trying to bring to the party. In some cases, they’re trying to fill a product gap in the marketplace (something overlooked by the big systems vendors or just overlooked in general) and in others, just trying to advance the state of the art.

A few examples spring to mind. A company called Netuitive is focusing on adaptive self-learning  -- a mechanism that correlates other metrics already being generated by VMware’s vCenter and vApp representing server performance and end user performance respectively. The idea is that this provides a holistic view not obtainable by looking at either set of metrics on its own and allows predictive models to be developed.

Hyper9, a company is based in Austin, Texas, is attempting to to reduce the complexity that virtualization introduces with a “Google-like” search engine as opposed to the classic hunt and find logic tree approach. Another company called Fortisphere is pushing the envelope in configuration management using automated policies.

Eventually these capabilities will find their way into the marketplace and IT shops will vote with their pocketbooks as to which capabilities are worth having and which are not. Then, sooner or later, these innovative approaches, if successful, are likely to get imitated, migrate into other product development cycles, and end up in the offerings of the larger established vendors. What’s on your virtualization management wish list that’s not being offered currently? I’d love to get your thoughts. Post here or send me an email.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/23/2008 at 12:49 PM