* Vieo offers new management features
Historically, the separation has been wide between tools and processes that monitor IT infrastructure and those that actually control it. These have been completely separate tool sets, with few exceptions. And the requirements for monitoring and the requirements for effecting change reflect night-and-day differences in terms of security, vulnerability, skills and access control.
On the other hand, there are real business pressures forcing this divide to become less of a chasm and more of a bridged moat. These have to do with the often-discussed requirements to prevent problems from occurring with a speed and precision that past process models can’t accommodate. Similarly, the unpredictable and asymmetrical nature of many Web-based application transactions makes dynamic optimization in real-time highly desirable, and increasingly necessary for competitive survival.
It’s therefore encouraging to see innovative designs such as Vieo’s, with its Vieo 1000 appliance, beginning to succeed with a broader range of adopters. Vieo is arguably the single most innovative product to combine monitoring and control from a broad infrastructure-wide perspective in support of application service levels. Focused in the data center, at least currently, the Vieo 1000 is showing value in enterprises where other products are too cumbersome and slow to adjust to the rapid rate of change, and in midsized and even smaller enterprises where larger, more traditional products are simply not cost-effective.
This week Vieo is introducing support for Citrix environments and expanded support for a number of Web-based application environments, including multiple database types and a variety of server choices.
The Vieo 1000 is packaged in a Linux-based appliance that interacts with network infrastructure as an Ethernet switch. This provides a non-disruptive position for gathering physical-layer connectivity information and assimilating network packet flow information. The Vieo 1000 leverages neural networking to “train itself” to capture normal and abnormal patterns as they may affect application SLAs.
The Vieo appliance can distribute intelligent agents (or else leverage SMS) in automated fashion to systems within a data center. These agents help to establish input parameters, which Vieo calls “gauges,” for monitoring conditions. Uniquely, Vieo’s “knob settings” can actually effect changes in the infrastructure in semi-automated mode (pending keystroke approval from an administrator) or in fully automated mode (with scripting). As an extension of this, the Vieo appliance can provision Web servers – and now Citrix servers – dynamically based on real-time shifts in demand.
Vieo has also introduced a capability for monitoring network devices on a selective basis through a translation mechanism between SNMP and Common Information Model (CIM). This allows data to be normalized from SNMP-based devices for support in Vieo’s CIM-compliant data store. Support for SNMP opens the door to monitoring devices such as switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers.
The new Citrix support is in many respects modeled on what Vieo has already done for Web-based application infrastructure. Citrix is an environment that demands attention to interdependencies across multiple components, from Web software and applications, to servers and databases, to network infrastructure. It is therefore a natural fit for Vieo, which is also smartly leveraging Citrix instrumentation, already in place on remote clients, to gain insights on WAN latency, among other things, and feed Vieo’s own superior analytic system. Among the Citrix-specific software services supported in the Vieo 1000 are the MetaFrame Presentation Server, Web Interface Server, Secure Ticket Authority, Secure Gateway, XML Service, and Data Store.
These extend the reach of relevant supported components such as Active Directory, IIS, Apache, iPlanet, WebLogic, WebSphere, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX operating systems.
The Vieo 1000 is definitely worth looking at if you need rapid attention to an entire application environment. It remains more of a data center sell than a NOC sell, but the new network management capabilities should at least help make that handshake between the two organizations more effective. The Vieo 1000 starts at $30,000.
