Hyper9 deepens the business view of virtualization initiatives

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Hyper9, a virtualization management company that launched into the IT consciousness two years ago, has been a start-up to watch ever since.

For example, CIO, a Network World sister publication, named Hyper9 to its 10 virtualization vendors to watch in 2010.

Start-up offers free 'Google-like' search tool for virtual environments

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Hyper9, a virtualization management company that launched into the IT consciousness two years ago, has been a start-up to watch ever since.

For example, CIO, a Network World sister publication, named Hyper9 to its 10 virtualization vendors to watch in 2010.

Start-up offers free 'Google-like' search tool for virtual environments

Hyper9 keeps popping up with good reason. It's got a good business story to tell. More specifically, Hyper9's VEO tool lets IT managers tell a good story to the business. IT administrators can use VEO not only to discover and organize information about virtualization but also to make good business use of that information.

"Hyper9 is leading the way in moving beyond monitoring, management and dashboard capabilities and into optimization," says Albert Lee, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates.

Indeed, Hyper9 pitches VEO as a tool for helping IT organizations "optimize the performance, capacity and configuration of their virtual environments from a tops-down business-oriented perspective." And, in that vein, last week it released a new version that includes a customizable dashboard for estimating the cost of running virtual machines (VM) on Amazon's EC2 cloud.

The new dashboard, called the Cloud Cost Estimator Lens, first helps IT organizations determine metrics such as the amount of memory and CPU capacity allocated to VMs and how much network bandwidth and storage VMs are consuming. It then translates that into cost information and runs a comparison to show how much the organization would pay to run a mirror environment in Amazon's cloud, Hyper9 says.

With the dashboard, IT has a sound basis on which to advise the business on cloud investment decisions. By optimizing virtualization information as a dollar cost, "IT can help along the conversation with the business," Lee says.

While an in-depth, CFO-level financial discussion would require a configuration management database-like business services management module, "at this point with this cloud cost estimator Hyper9 stands out among competitors," Lee says. "It can deliver a story on costs."

Besides the Cloud Cost Estimator Lens, the latest Hyper9 release features integration with Microsoft SharePoint and other common third-party collaboration tools. With such integration, business owners can get real-time access to reports on metrics such as uptime of critical VMs, resource consumption and potential chargeback costs without ever leaving their preferred collaboration application, the company says.

As Lee says, it's all about optimizing delivery of the virtualization information to the business. For its part, Hyper9 calls this increased transparency to the "black box" of virtualization initiatives.

Cloud cost analysis is creeping into other monitoring and management tools as well. How helpful would this type of information as you grow your virtualization deployments or evolve into cloud environments? Share your thoughts here.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.