News

posted on 13 February 2008 09:52

Akorri's BalancePoint management product for virtualised datacentres now supports virtualised storage.

BalancePoint software provides visibility into the root cause of performance issues through 'deep drill down' into server and storage resources, and the ability to understand both server and storage virtualization. Its use enables IT organizations to optimize performance and capacity to meet service level objectives at the lowest possible cost.

The idea is to reduce over-provisioning of storage and servers.

The new 2.0 version of BalancePoint has several new features, including GuidePoint Performance Index and Scorecard Reporting as well as the added storage support.

The GuidePoint Performance Index (PI) is the industry’s only performance metric that ensures server and storage infrastructure is optimally matched to the application’s workload requirements. The Performance Index provides IT with a mathematical, key performance indicator enabling them to make justified decisions to initiate IT optimization projects or make IT purchase decisions.

Automatically and dynamically determined, a PI index of 100 means that the assigned IT resources (servers, storage, etc.) are optimally matched to the underlying infrastructure. A PI greater than 100 indicates that the assigned IT resources are over-utilized and performance is poor. A PI significantly less than 100 illustrates under-utilized and IT management should consider efficiency initiatives such as server consolidation or storage tiering.

Scorecard Reporting provides performance and utilization information for ESX and VMs, physical servers, application service, and storage usage.

Storage virtualization support for IBM SVC (SAN Volume Controller) and HDS USP (Universal Storage Platform V) makes BalancePoint the only cross-domain performance management solution to support both virtualized servers and (some) virtualized storage. It doesn't support NetAp's V-Series virtualised storage, 3PAR's, LeftHand or Dell/EqualLogic or Pillar. There is probably support in there for Sun and HP versions of the HDS USP. There is no support for EMC's InVista or Brocade's file area network products (FAN) or EMC's RainFinity file virtualisation or, indeed, F5's file virtualisation. In fact it doesn't support NAS at all.

The list of storage virtualization products that are not supported is far longer than the ones that are.

We can also be fairly confident that BalancePoint 2.0 does not understand thin provisioning.

In general, as a storage resource management product, it is just starting out and, no doubt, some aggressive developments are on its road map as it looks out into the target-rich storage area.

BalancePoint 2.0 is now delivered as a virtual appliance; a pre-built, pre-configured, and ready-to-run application, packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. (This reminds one of LeftHand Networks' VSA, a Storage Area Network (SAN) packaged as a VMware VM.)

Find out more at http://www.akorri.com/products-overview.htm.