Nimsoft Extends Unified Monitoring with Comprehensive Solution for Vblock

CAMPBELL, Calif., Sept. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nimsoft, a CA Technologies company, today announced the addition of complete monitoring for private cloud Vblock Infrastructure Packages to the Nimsoft unified monitoring architecture — enabling end-to-end performance and availability monitoring of network, storage, compute and application layers.

By monitoring Vblock cloud environments as a whole — rather than as individual components — the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) enables service providers and enterprises to more quickly discover and address the root causes of issues that can impact critical IT services.

Complete monitoring for Vblock is available as an option to the on premise Nimsoft Monitoring Solution or the recently released Nimsoft On Demand (SaaS) offering.

"Vblock is changing the face of the data center and — until now — no one has had a single answer for monitoring it," said Gary Read, Nimsoft CEO.  "Nimsoft is enabling companies to take full advantage of the power of Vblock-based private clouds today and thereby gain the considerable competitive advantages that result from a cost-efficient, responsive and reliable IT environment."

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are integrated cloud solutions packages from the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition — a collaboration of Cisco, EMC and VMware.  Vblock offers a well-integrated, low-risk way for service providers and enterprises to deploy clouds that leverage performance-optimized, certified solutions.  

"The Vblock solution is generating significant and growing interest among both enterprises and hosted service providers, and with it comes an opportunity to rethink management along the same lines of convergence," said Jim Frey, research director, Enterprise Management Associates. "By providing the first comprehensive monitoring capability for the Vblock Infrastructure Package, NMS will help service providers extend value to enterprises looking to 'virtually' realize business agility with Vblock."

More than 25 Vblock certified partners and solution providers — including Dimension Data, FusionStorm, L7, Long View Systems, Midwave, MSN Communications, MTI, and UNIS LUMIN — are actively using NMS.

"As a Vblock-certified partner of the VCE coalition, MSN Communications is enthused about the prospects of this compelling new data center architecture," said Eric Lehto, advanced technologies manager, MSN Communications. "By delivering its pioneering support for Vblock performance and availability management, Nimsoft will enable us to improve our service and most fully capitalize on the business opportunity Vblock presents."

NMS helps service providers and enterprises get maximum business value from their investments in Vblock technology by:

• Preventing downtime with proactive problem notification, intelligent event correlation, automated recovery actions, and full SLA reporting.

• Enabling root-cause analysis for performance and availability problems anywhere across the entire Vblock stack.

• Minimizing deployment costs with auto-discovery of Vblock topology, automatic configuration and pre-built Vblock-specific display templates.

• Optimizing Vblock resource allocation with automatic notification of free or under-utilized resources — as well as over-use of available network, CPU or disk capacity.

• Quantifying the value delivered by the Vblock infrastructure through granular usage reporting.  

• Integrating monitoring of Vblock resources with other cloud and/or traditional resources in the IT environment.

"By delivering a complete, integrated technology stack, the Vblock infrastructure is sure to gain increased market adoption," said Dennis Callaghan, The451Group, senior analyst, Enterprise Software. "Once deployed, an organization's ability to monitor Vblock performance will play a critical role in the degree to which it is able to realize the value of its investment. Through its comprehensive unified monitoring coverage of the Vblock environment and current data center platforms, Nimsoft is poised to address a significant, and growing, market need."

NSM is aligned with the Vblock performance portability features and is able to adjust its monitoring with customers workloads. By utilizing its multi-tenant, flexible and dynamic unified monitoring architecture, NMS is able to transfer the monitoring of Vblock environments to any party at any time — without disruption or loss of data.  The inherent portability of the Nimsoft solution gives both enterprise customers and service providers unprecedented flexibility when it comes to building, hosting and managing cloud resources.

"One of the keys to success when it comes to delivering private clouds is giving customers full visibility into their cloud environments," said Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm. "With Nimsoft, we can offer this visibility as a part of our total Vblock offering — while at the same time driving down our operating costs and optimizing our service levels."

Leading-Edge Technology

Additional technology components have been added to the Nimsoft unified monitoring architecture to enable proactive monitoring and rapid root-cause analysis on Vblock Infrastructure Packages:

• Chassis – including rack temperature, access and physical security.
• Compute – including Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blades and elements
• Storage – including EMC's CLARiiON™, Symmetrix™, and Celerra™
• Networking and interconnects – including Cisco routers, SAN switches and Nexus™ softswitches

These features complement existing capabilities directly applicable to the Vblock environment.  NMS virtual environment capabilities include management instances, VM hosts (hypervisors), and hosted OS instances.  Application support includes databases, email servers, web servers and other applications running within the Vblock.

NMS and Nimsoft On Demand interoperate with native Ionix functions and make monitoring data available via customizable portlets and dashboards.

Supporting Quotes

"For enterprises and service providers alike, the Vblock is a game-changing platform for rapidly deploying cloud infrastructures. The ability to provide a complete monitoring solution that provides a holistic view into the health and performance of a Vblock across all the various subsystems, alleviates some of the biggest management concerns that customers have."

— Doug Toombs, senior analyst with Tier1 Research

"We're focused on offering cloud services and have a number of Vblock deals in process. The combination of Vblock and NMS is going to be instrumental in helping us both improve internal operational efficiencies and deliver the highest quality of service to our clients."

— Glenn McAtee, L7 general manager, Managed Services

"As the first company to ship Vblock 1 in Europe, the ability to include Nimsoft IT monitoring in our Vblock offerings will be very attractive to current and future clients. This latest enhancement from Nimsoft builds on our existing relationship and offerings we have in place based on the Nimsoft solution."

— Tony Conway, vice president, MTI Technology Europe

"EMC, Cisco and VMware are three of our most highly trusted partners, and we expect a very positive reaction to what Nimsoft brings to the Vblock stack. We look forward to using the Nimsoft Unified Monitoring solution to help more enterprises better manage their virtualization solutions and ultimately reach their strategic goals."

— Jim Leslie, president and CEO at Midwave

"When organizations deploy Vblock, they receive all the power and complexity of a full data center in what is in effect a 'cloud in a box.' Nimsoft enables us to help our clients understand and fully optimize their Vblock environments, so they can maximize value from these investments."

— Jan Barbier, business development manager, Data Center Solutions, Dimension Data

"The combination of Vblock and NMS will be instrumental in helping us both improve internal operational efficiencies and deliver the highest quality of service to our clients."

— Tim Hebert, president, Atrion

"Long View is committed to helping our clients accelerate their private cloud deployments and maximize the IT efficiencies these approaches can provide. With its support for Vblock, Nimsoft will be invaluable in helping us ensure our clients fully capitalize on this opportunity.  Nimsoft provides leadership in this space and our partnership is growing as Long View continues to support and manage environments in both the public and private cloud arenas."

— Patrick J. McGuinty, director of business development, Long View Systems

"By adopting Vblock, UNIS LUMIN's clients stand to gain a host of benefits, but they rely on us to monitor and manage these deployments. By leveraging NMS for our Keystone Partnered Solutions to monitor Vblock environments, we can deliver more value to clients and help them see greater ROI on their investment."

— Greg Walker, practice lead, Data Center, UNIS LUMIN Inc.

Nimsoft Webinar

Please join Nimsoft on October 14th to learn all about the extension of Unified Monitoring into Vblock. Click here to register: https://nimsoftevents.webex.com/nimsoftevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=920310310

About Nimsoft

Nimsoft, a CA Technologies company, provides Unified Monitoring solutions for virtualized data centers, hosted and managed services, cloud platforms, and SaaS resources. The Nimsoft Unified Monitoring architecture eliminates the need to deploy a new monitoring solution for outsourced services, public or private clouds, or SaaS implementations. About 800 customers use Nimsoft Unified Monitoring solutions, including hundreds of leading hosting, cloud and managed service providers such as 1&1, BlueLock, CDW, Hitachi, QTS, Rackspace, SoftLayer and Troubadour.  For more information, visit www.nimsoft.com  or to see Nimsoft Unified Monitoring in action, visit the Nimsoft public portal at www.unifiedmonitoring.com.

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