FineGround converts to appliance

Companies looking to optimize applications at remote offices or to quickly add performance management software to their data center can now get FineGround’s software packaged in a quick-to-deploy, easy-to-maintain appliance.

FineGround last week unveiled its Velocity appliance that can be used with the company’s Condenser optimization software and AppScope end-to-end application performance management software. The appliance can be pre-loaded with one or both of the software applications, depending on customer network demands.

Velocity is a means to providing FineGround customers with more options, the company says.

“We wanted to broaden our horizons a bit. We typically sell to the application staff, and we wanted to introduce the Velocity appliance to the networking folks,” says Jay Mellman, vice president of marketing at FineGround. “At its most basic, Velocity is an alternate delivery option to get application performance management software up and running on networks.”

The Velocity appliance can be installed at the edge of a data center in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) off of a standard load balancer. The data monitored and collected by the appliance is delivered back to the Web infrastructure or to end users. FineGround provides a Web interface as part of the management console, which can run on the appliance or be installed on a server as a separate software application. The data collected is stored in a local database on the appliance and can be extracted or output through Crystal reports.

The Velocity appliance is priced to be equivalent to the software on a CPU basis. Pricing for Velocity loaded with Condenser costs $50,000 per CPU, and AppScope costs $20,000 per application to be monitored. Hardware maintenance costs may also apply.