Uptime Offers 'Set It And Forget It' VMware Performance And Capacity Management

Toronto-based Uptime Software is adding VMware monitoring to the latest release of its IT systems management performance and capacity software for midmarket and enterprise organizations. Expected to ship later this month, up.time 6, billed as "set it and forget it" VMware performance and capacity management delivers enterprise-grade VMware monitoring and management to companies of all sizes for a fraction of the cost of competing solutions, says the company.

With close to a third of all workloads now running on virtual machines, customers are grappling with complexity and a lack of visibility into overall virtual system performance, says Uptime. The new version provides automated, real-time monitoring of VMware "everything," it says. In addition to providing an attractive upgrade to its existing customers, version 6 opens up new doors in large organizations where the existing monitoring tools may not be addressing VMware requirements.

In addition to the scalable VMware monitoring and reporting capabilities, version 6 adds sprawl control, virtual machine power awareness, VMware capacity metrics, global VMware capacity reporting and virtual capacity forecasting. Another attraction is the pricing: The new release offers customers 80% of the capabilities for 20% of the price of competing solutions from the Big 4 (IBM, HP, CA and BMC), says Uptime. The product can also be installed in 15 minutes, and a single dashboard can scale to monitor 5,000-plus servers and 20,000-plus services.

"Uptime 6 is a significant release that offers very deep visibility into the data center and is easy to implement and maintain," says Torsten Volk, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "This combination of powerful data center monitoring and low capex and opex constitutes a strong value proposition."

He says the most significant aspect of the new release is the software’s ability to, automatically and in real time, discover the topology of the VMware-driven data center--including clusters, VM hosts, VMs, resource pools, linked clones, storage relationships, individual blades and physical power supplies--without the use of agents. "Based on the historic and real-time analysis of the collected topology data, Uptime 6 is able to trigger scripts for vCenter Orchestrator to automatically deal with VM sprawl and resource bottlenecks."

Analyst Dennis Callaghan, The 451 Group, is impressed by the capacity management capabilities. "Adoption of server virtualization introduces this challenge. In the old world of one app per server, capacity management really isn’t an issue. Now, with multiple applications running on VMs on a single server, organizations need better metrics as to how much physical hardware and virtual server licenses they need to effectively run their applications and how much they’ll need in the future. It’s a pretty significant issue."

When you get into performance management of VMs--a key focus of Uptime’s for a while now--you need to be able to tie that data in with how much capacity you’re using and how much you’ll require, to have the same performance levels, as business conditions change, he says. Second (and related) to that is managing VM sprawl and reclaiming virtual resources that are no longer needed.

Callaghan believes the new release gives existing Uptime customers more capabilities that they won’t have to provide themselves or get from other vendors. "It continues to reinforce that Uptime is a credible Big 4 alternative for those organizations too large to go it alone or use an SMB product but not quite large enough for a Big 4 suite."

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