CloudPhysics Unveils Predictive Analytics Service for VMware Virtualization

Does predictive analytics have a role to play in virtualization? CloudPhysics, which delivers business intelligence for virtualized operations, seems to think so. On Tuesday, the company announced a service called Knowledge Base Advisor to help identify potential problems in VMware (VMW) deployments by matching data about operational challenges to users' individual configurations.

The service leverages reports, technical articles and other information published by vendors to derive information about potential operational threats to VMware workloads. It then determines which of those dangers is relevant to the virtualization environment of a particular organization, so that IT administrators can work proactively to address problems before they affect production.

Technically speaking, the CloudPhysics service may not quite be the same sort of predictive analytics that has become such a hot topic in the Big Data world, where parsing huge amounts of information to try to predict the future is now the thing to do. But at the core it's the same idea: By sorting through stacks of published reports that are too voluminous for IT staff to digest effectively on their own, the service identifies the bits that are relevant to a particular case to encourage proactive response.

So in a sense, CloudPhysics is doing for VMware virtualization what myriad other vendors are trying to achieve in areas ranging from policing to network-traffic analysis. And that's actually a little ironic, in that it's a reminder of how virtualization—which is supposed to make IT life simpler—has now grown so complex that it can be hard for administrators to keep track of the relevant data on their own. As CloudPhysics observes:

By necessity the VMware vSphere operations stack contains multiple hardware and software vendors. IT teams cannot keep up with the fast-moving target of weekly bugs and issues reports from vendors' Knowledge Base (KB) articles. They unknowingly run infrastructure at high risk until disasters strike. For instance, VMware alone frequently publishes a dozen vSphere KB articles each week. At the same time, the user's environment is constantly changing with applications modified, software or firmware updated, and new hardware introduced. This combination of vendor changes and user environment modifications is impossible to track — the Uptime Institute's Abnormal Incident Report database indicates human error as the source of 70 percent of data center problems.

CloudPhysics is offering Knowledge Base Advisor as a subscription service for enterprises. It's currently available in beta form from the company's website, and CloudPhysics will be demonstrating it at the VMworld 2013 event in San Francisco Aug. 25-29.