I had a chat with Gavin Jolliffe and Peter Grant of Xtravirt ahead of the launch of SONAR this week. You’ll want to learn more about how they aim to help you manage your virtualised environment more effectively.
The problem of ‘server sprawl’ is affecting the virtual world every bit as much as it did the physical one. In fact it’s now far easier to spin up a new workload and forget about it than when you’d need to commission and implement new data centre equipment. Even when you know it’s there, ‘Software Defined’ environments give you many more ways of getting things wrong than they did in the imagined past when everything was easy.
VMware has been the run away leader in the virtualisation market, with its hypervisors running on 22% of the 52m servers installed in the world (see Figure). Its vSphere platform helps its 400k customers to create, clone and migrate virtual machines, but is not as mature as it might be as a management platform. Its configurations, setting and functions are constantly changing – creating a big challenge for admin staff.
… Cue Xtravirt’s move in launching SONAR – a Reporting as a Service (RaaS) Cloud app for managing vSphere environments more effectively. Xtravirt is a UK-based supplier with 42 staff, better known for its consulting services, which are used by 10k customers to transform Cloud, data centre and workspace environments and including Barclays, Jaguar, Vodafone, ING, KPMG, Sony, the Metropolitan Police and HMRC. Its service lifecycle methodology spans advisory, delivery and operational phases. If SaaS is software… then this is its first foray as a software supplier since selling off its tools to become exclusively a consultancy back in 2008.
SONAR is a Web app designed to collect, analyse and report data from vSphere environments to reduce ‘time-to-information’, allow the IT team to work more effectively with Line of Businesses and mitigate the risks of undetected technical problems. While I was on the call with the Xtravirt team it generated a detailed automated report, which itemised a working vSphere environment and highlighted areas for remedial action.
The current alternatives for managing vSphere environments include using free scripting tools, running system and point monitoring tools, asking the IT team to report manually, and/or maintaining inadequate IT infrastructure policies. Of course Xtravirt believes its new solution is faster and cheaper – comparing the annual £4,740 cost of SONAR to using independent third party health assessments each quarter.
Having developed SONAR as a tool to help in its consulting activities, making it available as a Cloud service should allow the company to expand internationally (it’s just the sort of thing that should succeed on the EU’s Cloud 28+); although it runs a slight risk I suppose of reducing its own ‘independent third party health’ assessment revenues.
It looks as if vSphere is just the beginning as Xtravirt intends to address other virtualisation environments in future. My view? – if there are similar challenges in Hyper-V, KVM and Xen hypervisor environments, just wait until containers and Docker take off!