U.K. software startup SmartPeak, recently spun out of security vendor AppSense, is touting a new take on virtualization and claims it can boost application performance and ease the strain on users' virtual machines.
SmartPeak's flagship offering is its Workload Management (WLM) software, which essentially streamlines application workloads on database and Web servers. "You can allocate and prioritize the CPU, memory, and network bandwidth to make sure that the application gets the resources that it needs," Dan Hepner, SmartPeak's marketing manager, told Byte and Switch.
AppSense, which offers products to protect Windows Terminal Server and Citrix-based environments, began development work on WLM back in 2002. A few weeks ago, however, the security vendor set up SmartPeak as a separate entity focused on application performance with former AppSense exec Tony Bolland as its CEO.
SmartPeak's approach to application performance, according to Hepner, was born in the mainframe space, although the startup is targeting applications running on Windows servers, from SQL Server through to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
The startup's secret sauce is an algorithm called Smart Scheduler, which links up with Windows' own scheduler, to perform real-time calculations of the resources needed by each application. WLM is priced at around $466 per CPU.
