Nimsoft, MTI Team on VBlock Private Cloud Management
Cloud-in-a-box solutions involve a lot moving parts in a tightly packed space. For instance: Vblock — backed by Cisco, EMC, and VMware — combines servers, storage and hypervisor among other elements. Finding ways to manage all of that has some service providers and product vendors putting their heads together. Nimsoft and MTI, a European managed services provider and cloud consultant, collaborated on the development of the Nimsoft for Vblock monitoring product.
“We decided to share the development of probes and interfaces to the underlying infrastructure,” said Aad Dekkers, chief marketing officer and head of business development at MTI.
Dekkers, speaking at an Enterprise Management Associates webinar on private cloud monitoring, said the companies created the management components with the objective of building something that would satisfy mutual customers.
MTI uses the technology as the basis for its MTI Care service, which debuted in October 2010. MTI Care spans remote infrastructure monitoring, alerting and analysis. The company said its solution can remotely monitor servers, OSes, networks, storage, and back-up as well as Vblock Infrastructure Packages.
For its customers, Nimsoft took the wraps off its Vblock monitoring product in September 2010. Nimsoft was acquired by CA Technologies in early 2010. Since that time, CA has been adjusting all of its software offerings to more closely resemble the types of license agreements and subscription agreements that Nimsoft offers to MSPs.
Meanwhile, Andy Kicklighter, senior technical marketing manager at Nimsoft, said Nimsoft for Vblock addresses key monitoring challenges in that environment. Those include the ability to discover what is in Vblock as virtual machines come and go. Another issue: correlating application problems with the physical and virtual layers of the cloud in a box infrastructure.
The compression of multiple elements in a small space complicate the management task. Kicklighter said cloud approaches such as vBlock cram a floor’s worth of data center computing power into a a couple of boxes.
“This level of density requires a greater degree of correlation between all the elements in the infrastructure,” he said.
Jim Frey, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, said converged cloud infrastructures present a great opportunity to consolidate the management approach and reduce the number of tools.
The task is fairly complicated, so teaming arrangements to get the job done may become may continue to surface.
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