Zenoss Datacenter Insight

Recently I had a chance to speak with Tim Galligan, Zenoss SVP Customer Operations, and his colleague Pam Risch, Director of Marketing, about a new product, Datacenter Insight, the company was launching. In short, the company claims that its advanced analytics, dynamic realtime model will allow its product to beat other suppliers by managing physical, virtual and now cloud environments.

What Zenoss has to say about Datacenter Insight

Zenoss Datacenter Insight is designed to give cloud operators the tools necessary to manage and operate today’s IT environment and to address the challenges of tomorrow. Whether it’s making a short-term decision to reallocate resources or long-term capacity planning, Datacenter Insight provides the datacenter intelligence needed today to deliver the highest quality of service without driving excessive operating costs.

Details:

• Enterprise-grade analysis of the entire IT infrastructure:
  • Infrastructure utilization and capacity trending
  • Performance, availability and inventory reporting
  • Analysis on all physical devices – networking, servers, storage, power controls, temperature sensors, etc.
  • Analysis of all virtual resources – virtual applications, virtual hosts, virtual servers, and next generation integrated platforms such as VMware vCloud and Cisco UCS.

• Powerful decision making with an easy-to-use, centralized analytic engine:
  • A central data warehouse of all managed domains, resources, and devices
  • Out-of-the-box analysis capabilities
  • Web-based ad-hoc report building
  • Executive dashboard creation
  • Multi-format report export and scheduling

Snapshot analysis

Zenoss, a supplier of open source software, certainly has developed a rather dynamic community and a strong following. The product appear powerful without requiring every IT administrator to have a Phd.  I believe that even an analyst, like me, could use the product with only minimal training.

Since there are so many different suppliers of management software for physical, virtual and cloud environments and most of the players are far bigger than Zenoss, it appears to me that marketing and customer awareness, not base technology, is the company's biggest challenge.

I've had people ask me about management tools and strategies of CA, IBM, BMC and even VMware, but never about Zenoss.  That's too bad.  The products appear innovative and useful to IT administrators.

If the company can be as creative with marketing as they have been with technology, they could be a big winner in the market.