BSM vendor Zyrion targets private clouds

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

Mapping business services to underlying infrastructure is all good and well and a fairly straightforward exercise in traditional IT environments. Attempting the same as business services move about a highly virtualized, private enterprise cloud is quite another story.

In the former, IT could easily track on which IT resource a payroll application, for example, sits and what's causing users to call regarding slow performance. In a private cloud, the virtual server processing payroll requests might be on physical host A at one moment but on physical host B the next. And who knows what other applications are running on those physical hosts from one moment to the next, either.

A COMPLEX LANDSCAPE: Client virtualization in a cloud environment

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Mapping business services to underlying infrastructure is all good and well and a fairly straightforward exercise in traditional IT environments. Attempting the same as business services move about a highly virtualized, private enterprise cloud is quite another story.

In the former, IT could easily track on which IT resource a payroll application, for example, sits and what's causing users to call regarding slow performance. In a private cloud, the virtual server processing payroll requests might be on physical host A at one moment but on physical host B the next. And who knows what other applications are running on those physical hosts from one moment to the next, either.

A COMPLEX LANDSCAPE: Client virtualization in a cloud environment

In the cloud world, business service management (BSM) tools must account not only for the live migration of virtual machines but also for the interrelationships between services introduced because of the shared infrastructure. The challenge for users is this: "If a virtual server is very busy because somebody is running a complex application on it, it could or most likely would impact another server on the same shared resource. So how do you go about figuring out that a busy service is impacting another service on the shared IT resource?" describes Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion, a BSM vendor focused on the mid-market.

Of course, Zyrion believes it has the answer. It has rolled out expanded business service container technology in its Traverse enterprise network management platform. Rather than static mapping between a business service container and underlying infrastructure, Traverse now allows organizations to create logical, business-oriented views of the overall physical and virtual environment to account for the dynamic nature of the cloud and the use of shared resources. Users can define service-level agreements on a container-by-container basis, create fault-tolerant redundant models within a container and create nested containers with cascading alarms, the company says.

The container technology overlays Traverse's topology discovery model. "Our business service management layer does the correlations. That is, it analyzes the performance of all these different containers, sees which are on shared resources and develops linkages between them," Aggarwal says. "Reports show which business containers have something in common between them. If one service is busy, the report will show how it's impacting the others."

The enhanced container technology, for use in private clouds, is available immediately. You can view a demo or try out Traverse in a free 30-day trial. In future enhancements Zyrion will account for business services that traverse not only the private cloud but also the public cloud infrastructure, Aggarwal says.

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.