* TTI selects Uptime's all-in-one monitoring tool to better support visibility needs
Physical and virtual but one view — this goal continues to be a driving force as IT managers plot their ways toward increased use of virtualization technology across the infrastructure. Such was the case at TTI, a specialized electrical components distributor based in Fort Worth, Texas.
TTI recently selected Uptime Software’s up.time server monitoring software to gain control over and a single management dashboard for its physical and virtual servers. It replaced a NetIQ installation.
“With up.time we can get all the functionality we need for less than the cost of NetIQ’s annual maintenance fees alone,” said Steve Marshall, a server administration manager at TTI in an official announcement. “Up.time makes it easy to identify systems that are underutilized, allowing us to optimize those machines to perform at much higher levels. Considering that we have critical systems running in both our physical and virtual infrastructure, the ability to keep an eye on all our resources at once is priceless.”
Uptime is among a number of monitoring vendors seeking a place within smaller enterprises that are advancing their next-generation IT infrastructure strategies, says Dennis Callaghan, a senior analyst at The 451 Group. “Uptime is strong in the mid market, having had a good bit of success there and with departmental implementations,” he says.
Uptime’s target customer has between 50 and 2,500 servers, although it does have server larger deployments as well, says Phil Didaskalou, Uptime CEO. “When we look the systems management opportunities in the mid-enterprise, we very much see a blue ocean,” he adds.
As they progress their virtualization, as well as cloud computing, strategies, mid-enterprises face a bigger challenge than their larger corporate counterparts — that of skills, Didaskalou says. “Mid-enterprise companies don’t have teams of people or specialists that they can slide into virtualization or the cloud. They’re looking at a more constrained set of resources requiring more generalized skills.”
The introduction of virtualization and cloud computing, therefore, creates a perfect storm for monitoring companies such as Uptime that can tie together physical, virtual and cloud in a single pane of glass with a heterogeneous, cross-platform tool. “And this is irrespective of whether you’re managing servers at one data center or at 15 across the globe,” Didaskalou adds.
For its part, he says, Uptime offers “deep monitoring” that enables IT managers to identify consolidation candidates, optimize virtual machine density and ensure end-user performance. In addition, using the up.time monitoring tools they can map business services to infrastructure for service-level agreement (SLA) management.
The ability to deliver hard, factual SLA data also is of particular important to mid-enterprise companies, Didaskalou says. “Mid-enterprise companies are aggressively looking at outsourcing, and we’re finding that IT really has to justify itself very clearly in order to stay around. IT managers are under more and more pressure to prove service levels and show that data to the business,” he explains.
Uptime enhanced SLA monitoring and reporting in its latest release, up.time 5.3. IT managers can set up SLAs in 10 minutes or less, dry-run potential SLAs for a reality check and map services and business units to infrastructure, Didaskalou says.
Up.time is available for $695 per physical server plus annual support fees.
