Virtualization Startup Bursts From Financial Giant

The venture offshoot of Credit Suisse has launched a small virtualization software startup from within the bank itself.

DynamicOps LLC emerged from stealth today, with a claim to have off-the-shelf management software for sale. Called Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), the product tracks and manages the deployment of virtualized environments based on VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft hypervisors, as well as on other virtual infrastructure elements, such as Solaris Zones or LPARS.

VRM originated as a custom-developed package for the Global R&D Group at Credit Suisse. A group led by Steve Yatko, managing director of the division, spent over two years creating a series of tools that keeps track of thousands of virtual desktops and servers at four locations worldwide. "VRM enabled us to reduce our provisioning lead times from weeks to minutes," said Stephen Hilton, managing director of Enterprise Servers and Storage at Credit Suisse, in a statement.

When the bank saw it was onto something potentially marketable, its NEXT II venture group got involved and bankrolled the startup for an undisclosed sum. The Burlington, Mass.-based firm spun out as an independent entity in late January 2008 but has taken a few months to assemble enough of an internal infrastructure, including a Website and 15 employees, to be ready to tell its tale.

Part of the education process will be letting potential customers know they don't have to replace anyting to use VRM. "We don't compete with the hypervisor vendors, we're complimentary to them," says Rich Krueger, the former EVP of business development and international sales at Incipient, who also worked at EMC.Krueger says VRM creates automated provisioning of virtual desktops and servers via templates, applies policies for access and usage of the virtual elements, performs chargeback on them, and "end of lifes" old VMs, while tracking rogue entries on a network.

All this happens automatically if you've got VMware ESX, XenServer, or Microsoft Virtual Server, he says. Custom interfaces and capabilities are available, however. And VRM's compatibility will be extended as needed to accommodate more virtualization products. Eventually, too, Krueger says, VRM will be able to manage I/O virtualization and storage virtualization as well as "compute virtualization."

VRM is aimed primarily at enterprise firms that are looking to manage large virtualized infrastructures, especially ones based on more than one kind of virtualization product.

Who's doing that? Krueger insists large companies are demanding heterogeneous management tools for virtualized networks.

So far, DynamicOps hasn't revealed any customers other than its former parent, though Krueger says there are a range of organizations, including ones in healthcare and other areas in addition to financial services, that are testing VRM.DynamicOps has not revealed pricing, though Krueger says pricing will be released shortly. It's also not clear what the product will compete against; while Krueger claims it's mostly competitive with in-house projects, it's likely that the growing roster of virtualization management tools, as well as VMware and Citrix integrators, will make similar claims.

DynamicOps may also entail customization. Few enterprise-sized customers are likely to enlist a package that can't be tweaked to suit their needs.

Despite remaining questions, the next few months should prove interesting ones for DynamicOps, as it attempts to penetrate virtualized enterprise infrastructures.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.