Vieo looks to automate application management

AUSTIN, TEXAS - A small company new to systems management says its hardware appliance will give network managers a real-time, automated alternative to the traditional software tools used to manage complicated application server environments.

Vieo's Adaptive Application Infrastructure Management (AAIM) appliance - which is still in development and expected to ship in mid-2003 - is a Layer 2 switch that initially will support and manage hosts running Web, application and database servers.

AAIM will watch traffic looking for application abnormalities compared with predefined policies. And because AAIM is a switch, when problems crop up it can redirect traffic, reprioritize applications or reallocate network resources to remedy the situation, says Robert Fabbio, Vieo CEO and president.

Fabbio - founder of Tivoli Systems and Dazel, which he sold to IBM and Hewlett-Packard, respectively - might have struck a nerve in the management market, says Rich Ptak, president of consulting firm Ptak Associates.

Large network management companies and smaller players alike - including Managed Objects, Smarts and Micromuse - have tried to automate application performance management with software. But the tools generally require agents, a lot of upfront configuration and hands-on management to keep up with the dynamic nature of application and Web server environments.

"AAIM's agentless architecture and automated, high-speed approach proposes to manage the infrastructure in real time to the benefit of a company's business-critical applications," Ptak says. "It looks to me as though [Vieo] is positioning itself along the lines of IBM's autonomic computing model."

Fabbio says while Vieo initially will target AAIM at companies trying to solve particular application performance problems, he predicts that within three years AAIM will compete with IBM Tivoli, Computer Associates and Cisco as customers learn how the appliance can change the way applications are managed.

AAIM's first release will support Apache Web services, WebLogic application services, Oracle data services, and Linux and Solaris platforms. Fabbio says the company will add support for popular industry products such as SAP applications, WebSphere application services, DB2 and SQL databases, and AIX and Windows platforms.

Fabbio joined Vieo last November. Before his arrival, Vieo had two other incarnations: one as a network consulting firm founded in 1994 and the second as an InfiniBand provider in early 2000. Fabbio says InfiniBand is the management-enabling technology.

The appliance will come with 200 Gigabit Ethernet ports and translate that to InfiniBand inside the box. "Because InfiniBand offers 800M bit/sec worth of throughput vs. the 100M bit/sec of Gigabit Ethernet," Fabbio says, the appliance can perform the deep packet analysis needed for network management without degrading network performance.

Vieo is not the first company to tackle the management problem using software-enabled hardware. Companies such as NetQoS,Packeteer, Peregrine Systems, and SilverBack Technologies have management products based on hardware.