Examining datacenter operations with Akorri BalancePoint

Akorri and I have been trying chat and one thing or another has made that impossible.  They've sent me a presentation deck in advance of our meeting and so, I'll present a few highlights here prior to our call.  I'll follow up on them later.

Here's how Akorri describes their product

Akorri™ BalancePoint® virtual infrastructure management is the only performance and capacity management software providing analysis across IT virtualization layers and technology silos for both virtual and physical, server and storage infrastructure.  BalancePoint helps companies troubleshoot problems within minutes, optimize utilization, and improve performance in the dynamic data center.

Unlike traditional system and element management tools that only look at one silo (physical or virtual servers or storage), BalancePoint agentless software dynamically models and analyzes the entire infrastructure to understand how application workloads, utilization levels and resources interact bringing much needed infrastructure-wide intelligence to the data center.

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Traditional enterprise systems management products focus on a single “silo” in the infrastructure, such as storage. Akorri technology correlates both physical and virtual resources across servers and storage, extracting data from multiple sources and layers in a heterogeneous infrastructure to provide near real-time insights and analysis throughout the application workflow path.

Akorri taps into and complements existing monitoring, Storage Resource Management (SRM), and Application Performance Management (APM) tools to provide a higher-level, application-oriented view that ties the infrastructure together through unique metrics like Infrastructure Response Time™.

Akorri enables IT organizations to:

• Identify Performance Bottlenecks — Find problems and contention points before they impact operations.
• Troubleshoot Problems Faster — Identify root cause quickly so people can get back to work.
• Manage VMware in Production — Improve VMware server and storage performance and utilization through “single pane of glass” management.
• Improve Storage Utilization — Manage capacity more efficiently to stop over-provisioning of storage, defer new storage purchases, and plan for growth.
• Manage, Optimize and Plan — Identify opportunities for improvement and plan for future growth requirements.

Snapshot analysis

As organizations take the journey to a more virtualized environment, it can be harder and harder for them to actually see what's happening in their datacenters.  Before it was possible to walk down a row of racks housing computers and know what each one of them was doing. Workloads didn't pick themselves up and move to other machines, or perhaps other datacenters, as a response to meeting service level objectives or dealing with outages.

Virtual processing software combined with automation, orchestration and other types of management software changes all of that.

Akorri has developed tools that can shine light on what's going on and allow an organization to better understand what's behind response time. It also makes it more easily possible for organizations to track applicaiton costs for reporting or chargeback systems.

Although I need to learn more about the product, on the face of it, BalancePoint would be a useful addition to an IT administrator's tool kit.