Netuitive Goes Virtual

There's a major shift going on in IT, and Netuitive is ready for it. According to execs, the vendor's latest product will eliminate the guesswork involved in managing performance in virtualized environments.

Netuitive's Service Analyzer for VMware, unveiled today, brings the vendor's technology for analyzing IT infrastructure performance to virtual machines in VMware. Netuitive's aim is to streamline troubleshooting of performance issues in VMware networks.

For instance, if one virtual machine slows down, Netuitive will be able to identify the VM responsible for the performance hit.

Up to now, much troubleshooting in virtual environments has been a matter of trial and error. A manager may find that one or more VMs slow down, but she has to fiddle with the setup to find a solution. For example, turning off one machine may cause others to stop signaling trouble; or adding a VM to a particular application may do the trick.

This kind of manual-intensive activity is proof that traditional infrastructure-based management won't work with virtualization. "We're seeing a massive de-aggregation of computing resources," says analyst George Hamilton of the Yankee Group. The days when agents on servers, racks, storage devices, and networking gear reported their status to a polling management system are ending, he maintains. Instead, there's a need for "top down" management, focused on interpreting the behavior of services, as opposed to the ups and downs of specific machines.Netuitive's been focused on this kind of thing for awhile. Its market niche has been business service management (BSM), which interprets high-level network and system management data in light of business objectives. Netuitive's software crunches real-time system and network performance data to answer questions like: How is the email service performing? Is there degradation in online banking? Is my sales operation about to crash? And of course, the goal is to pinpoint the cause of any trouble.

Doing this kind of analysis requires "self-learning," whereby the normal state of systems is monitored and a profile calculated for comparison against incoming data. It also requires analysis tools that can predict trends. Netuitive already boasts these features and functions.

Indeed, there's nothing particularly new here. What is new is Netuitive's application of its technology to VMware. Now, Netuitive says it will be able to learn the behavior of VMs and ESX servers in terms of time of day, day of week, physical server, resource pools, and so forth. The software will cross-correlate this data and present information about service performance based on how all of the elements in a virtual environment relate to each other.

Here's an example of how Netuitive's reporting will work:

Figure 1:

Customers will likely need to dedicate a machine to Netuitive, and the cost is about $5,000 per ESX server, plus about $200 per virtual machine. The software runs under Unix, Linux, and Windows.

No one is available to testify to how this product works. But up to now, Netuitive has shipped to roughly 165 companies, including Citigroup, Fedex, Kroger, Harley Davidson, the U.S. Air Force, and Verizon. Presumably, some of these are trialing the VMware application.

One thing: While being a BSM player put Netuitive in competition with vendors like Managed Objects (Netuitive OEMs to another player, BMC), this step into VMware will likely put it in line with IT automation vendors like Opsware, Opalis, and Bladelogic, which also aim to manage virtualized data centers. All around, this competition ups the temperature of an already hot market.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch