- More porn sneaks onto the iPhone
- 'Swatting' case shows need to ban caller-ID spoofing
- Why the iPhone can't be "killed"
- Nortel enterprise chief wants to bring back Bay
- US sets final emergency responder wireless pilot
Startup firm Fortisphere on Monday plans to launch a product suite aimed at managing virtualization "sprawl."
"We spent nine months talking to [data center professionals]," said John Suit, Fortisphere's CTO. "What was apparent to us was that typically, how these guys are tracking their virtual machines is with an Excel spreadsheet."
The company's offering, Virtual Essentials, is based on two products. The first is Fortisphere Virtual Insight, a tool set for tracking, tagging and monitoring virtual machines as they move throughout their lifecycle, from preproduction to production.
Users get a visual representation of a virtual machines' parent, sibling and child relationships. There is also a reporting engine and an auditing function for recording changes and transactions. Fortisphere Virtual Foresight is the other half, dealing with policy enforcement.
Policy rules are embedded within virtual machines, meaning the information will remain with each one, as well as any clones and copies, according to Fortisphere. There is also a repository component, and an analytic engine that monitors risk and compliance violations by crunching data from virtual machines and hypervisors.
Fortisphere's product uses kernel-level drivers, rather than other means of interacting with virtual machines, such as agents. Fortisphere contends this approach affords a great deal of control, while remaining lightweight.
The company is competing with a number of other startups, such as Embotics. Fortisphere said it has a number of beta customers, but company officials declined to name any or make one available for an interview.
Pricing for Virtual Essentials starts at "little bit over $10,000," including maintenance, according to Fortisphere executives, who declined to be more specific.
The software was built with a mid-market customer in mind, in terms of its ease of use, according to Fortisphere.
Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said one strength of Fortisphere is its ability to manage virtual machines across multiple hypervisors -- VMware, Citrix's XenServer and Microsoft's Hyper-V. "This is a something end-users are asking for as they deploy more than one solution for server virtualization," he wrote in an e-mail message.
Partner Content
Explore the Ultrium Edge
The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.
Find Out More
Disk and Tape Square Off
Discover what disk and tape really cost and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization
Download this White Paper
Don't Fall for the Myths
The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.
Review this information
information examination
An examination of information security issues, methods and securing data with LTO-4 tape drive encryption
Read this analysis
Comments (1)
Interesting take on virtual machine sprawlBy Armchair General on August 31, 2008, 6:08 amI came across an interesting article today on the same subject, but which compared VM sprawl with the explosion in online storage (hard drive space) in the 90's,...
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments