I’ve been thinking about a partnership Dell and Netuitive announced a short while ago. Dell is an aspiring member of the data center club and need to establish a leadership position in a number of areas. One of the most important areas is to bolster Dell’s image as having a complete solution that goes beyond systems and storage hardware. Netuitive is a relative newcomer to the systems management market having some really innovative ideas and products. Dell is hoping that Netuitive will add some powerful network and systems management tools to its portfolio. Netuitive is hoping Dell can help it establish itself on the world stage as a premier supplier of intelligent analytical products.
Putting the strengths of these two companies together addresses challenges brought by today’s approach to application architecture. It has long been known that today’s distributed, multi-tier applications, that may be hosted on physical, virtual or cloud-based systems, have surpassed the ability for any human to track or manage in real time. Netuitive’s technology gathers information about the workloads executing in the data center, applies really intelligent analytics to that data and creates useful information making it easier to really understand what is happening in real time.
Although it is true that suppliers of management technology have addressed the issue in the past, many of those tools require extensive configuration and staff training, So, IT administrators are faced with the task of teaching those products about the system configurations, network configuration and configuration of each of the application frameworks, database management tools, etc. used to create the application. The products than go about the business of gathering enormous amounts of run time data and present it in tables or graphs.
Only a very few, including Netuitive, apply any level of of automated intelligence. Netuitive, by the way, calls this “predictive analytics.” The goal is seeking out issues and help administrators destroy problems before they happen.
I suspect this partnership will really help Dell’s enterprise customers really understand what is happening in their complex IT environments.
In a sense of full disclosure, I must point out that Netuitive has been a client of the Kusnetzky Group.
