Evident Software - Analyzing your virtual environment

Out of the blue, I received an Email from Roger W. Boyce, President and CEO of Evident Software, offering to brief me on the company, its products and its direction. After scanning through the company's Website, I have to admit I was intrigued. I've spoken with many companies that are offering management tools for clusters, grids or some other virtualized environment. This was the first time I've learned of one that is focused on reporting and analyitcs of a virtualized environment rather than on either virtualizing the environment or managing the virtualized environment. Here's a quick summary of our conversation.

• Evident Software offers two products: Evident ClearStone and Evident Enterprise.
• Evident ClearStone offers the following capabilities:
  • provides the information required for setting policy and dynamic capacity management.
  • meters both compute and data grid resource usage and correlates those metrics with additional IT resource metrics (e.g. LAN/WAN network consumption), adds application and business information and presents dashboards, reports and analytics for business, operational, and IT users.
  • inspects and analyzes usage of selected grid, infrastructure and SOA components in “near real-time” producing snapshots of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) based on SLA’s
  • incorporates domain intelligence to identify anomalies that could result in alerts/notifications, such as SLA-exceptions if KPI’s are not being satisfied

• Evident Enterprise offers the following capabilities:
  • helps IT managers identify and eliminate inefficiencies in their enterprise network infrastructures, close the gap between known inventory and unknown servers, and price network services based on usage.
  • Asset Auditing - usage-based asset discovery and validation process helps enterprise IT organizations close the 'gaps' in existing inventories, ensuring compliance with IT governance policies and providing critical visibility for more effective consolidation efforts.
  • Demand Profiling - provides a network tool to profile demand and usage by providing transparency into which servers and applications are being used, and what users, organizations or locations are driving the demand.
  • Service Pricing - allows pricing of network services based on actual usage and costs. It allows IT staffs to more accurately budget, allocate and recover network costs, communicate the value of their infrastructure, and align with the rest of the organization.

Would your organization be able to better utilize virtualized environment with this information? How are you obtaining this type of information now?