Netuitive making waves in predictive IT analytics

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

For years the quiet voice of predictive IT analytics, Netuitive has come out roaring in June.

Earlier this month, for example, word hit the street that Netuitive has struck a technology integration deal with Dell. Per terms of that relationship, Dell will embed Netuitive's behavioral analysis technology in its Virtual Integrated System (VIS) architecture for cloud management, says Daniel Heimlich, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances.

BACKGROUND: Dell plugs hole in virtualization stack

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For years the quiet voice of predictive IT analytics, Netuitive has come out roaring in June.

Earlier this month, for example, word hit the street that Netuitive has struck a technology integration deal with Dell. Per terms of that relationship, Dell will embed Netuitive's behavioral analysis technology in its Virtual Integrated System (VIS) architecture for cloud management, says Daniel Heimlich, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances.

BACKGROUND: Dell plugs hole in virtualization stack

The integration gives Dell a competitive edge and Netuitive an opportunity to move downstream from its traditional base of global financial institutions, Rob Illsley, an Ovum analyst, says in a recent column. "Ovum considers behavioral analysis the next major innovation for infrastructure and cloud management. ... The need for a new approach to management is driven by the increased use of virtualization for mission-critical applications and cloud services," he says.

Last week, at Morgan Stanley's 11th annual CTO Summit, Netuitive received the firm's IT Innovation Award for its role in a massive private cloud project, Heimlich says. As part of the project, Morgan Stanley is developing a self-service delivery model involving virtual desktop infrastructure and encompassing nearly 130,000 virtual machines and multiple storage and network platforms. With Netuitive's software, Morgan Stanley will get end-to-end performance visibility across its virtual data center architecture and be able to forecast performance anomalies, he describes.

And on Monday, the company announced Netuitive 5.5, which Heimlich says is about making the predictive analytics for the virtual infrastructure on par with those for the physical data center, which the company has worked on for 10 years. He points out four key additions.

The first is a "one-view" dashboard, which provides IT with all of the performance information and analytics needed to run a virtual data center, Heimlich says. "As you can imagine," he adds, "in these environments there might be hundreds if not thousands or even millions of components, and this provides a way to correlate all the metrics."

Netuitive 5.5 also introduces chargeback -- or showback, if that's the primary requirement -- reporting as well as new product support. Netuitive is now able to manage multi-hypervisor environments, having added support for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. Earlier versions supported VMware's hypervisor exclusively. And, on the storage side, Netuitive has added integration with EMC Celerra.

Netuitive 5.5 will be generally available on June 27. The company has not released pricing.

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.