Akorri touts smarter app management

Akorri is looking to help enterprises improve application delivery with software that analyzes the impact of changes to storage and server resources on application performance.

The start-up's first product is BalancePoint, which can correlate dependencies among applications and the storage and server resources allocated to them and predict how changes, such as added capacity or increased use, will affect operations.

"As we talked with customers, one of the problems we saw was a lack of visibility across technology silos," says Richard Corley, Akorri's founder and CTO. "To manage the data center today, you have to have a holistic view of it, not just what's going on with storage, what's going on with servers. You have to bring them together. IT really has no idea how the relationships between servers, storage, networks and applications are affecting one another."

Traditionally, the adjusting of network resources is a manual chore, solved with spreadsheets and a lot of calculations. Over-provisioning is common.

As many as 80% of Fortune 1000 companies surveyed by The InfoPro say they tend to add excess capacity to storage and server elements to ensure application performance when dealing with application brownouts caused by scant or strained server and storage resources. Yet they experience brownouts despite added capacity. Almost 75% of the companies surveyed by The InfoPro suffered at least one application brownout per month.

BalancePoint competes with storage and network resource-management products from EMC, HP, IBM and Onaro. Unlike products that show only where data is stored, what capacity is available and which storage resources support the business processes, Akorri's BalancePoint analyzes those dependencies and predicts how storage and server resources will affect the performance of applications.

"Akorri's BalancePoint reminds me of the three rings of Ballantine Ale, which stood for purity, body and flavor," says Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "The company's product is able to cross-correlate systems, storage and network resource management and has the ability to reach across one domain into another." That's what EMC is looking to do with the acquisitions of BMC's application-centric storage-management tools and Smarts, he adds.

Akorri, which has 50 employees, was founded in January 2005 by Corley, founder of Pirus Networks, acquired in 2002 by Sun for $167 million. Its name derives from a colossal New Zealand tree, the Kauri, which is known for its size and strength.