To address these challenges, Netuitive uses self-learning and continuously adaptive software. The company claims that software is the culmination of nine patented technologies and 20 years of research. Netuitive 5.0 monitors the network and uses automated mathematics and analysis to understand normal system behavior across IT silos, isolate root causes of service issues and forecast degradations before they impact performance.
So does it work? Mayorga thinks so. Last year after a three day weekend, Mayorga and his team came back to the office only to find Exchange service slowed to a crawl. Nothing had changed in the network, yet Exchange was simply not responding. Normal diagnostics showed nothing, but clearly something was up. That's when he remembered the Netuitive software he had installed a few weeks previously. Mayorga went to the Netuitive console "and I saw a big red circle on the ESX host," he recalls, "I drilled down on the host and it showed that I/O was way off the scale and responding 10 times slower."
The problem? A woman had come in over the weekend and went through the graphics files on the systems backup looking for graphics for a new brochure. The Compellant subsystem, seeing the traffic activity, registered that these files were active and migrated them to tier one storage and moved the Exchange files to a lower performing tier since they weren't in use. When Mayorga and his team resumed work, Exchange was hitting a slower tier, slowing down the I/O system. "That made a convert out of me," he says.
Yet for all its promise, Mayorga warns that IT professionals should approach 5.0 with caution. "Netuitive is a fantastic engine for figuring out trends, but you must feed it the right data and getting data into Netuitive world is challenging," he says. Netuitive integrates with specific platforms, such as Tivoli and HP Openview, but that's not sufficient for many organizations. "They have all the hooks up for big business, but they don't have the hooks for small businesses I can pull data from VMCenter, but really want data form filers (Compellant), Cisco switches, and i.Link interfaces from my HP servers. Getting them into Netuitive is not trivial."
As such, while Mayorga buys into the Netuitive vision of service management, he's not there in a practical sense. Getting there and expanding those options will be critical for performance management vendors. A standard, such as IF-MAP could help a lot on this score. Netuitive president, Nicola Sanna, president and CEO of Netuitive, acknowledged as much, but said that he'd wanted to wait to see if there would be greater industry adoption of the protocol. Whether through IF-MAP or some other mechanism, until Netuitive can integrate with more data sources attracting widespread enterprise, IT deployments will remain a challenge. Pricing for Netuitive 5.0 is per managed element. Each server runs $1,000 to manage, $12,500 per socket for VMware, and $20,000 for an application. The product is currently available.
