Nimsoft Releases Unified Monitoring Solution for Vblocks

By Charlene O'Hanlon

Nimsoft has extended its unified monitoring technology to manage Vblocks, the data-center-in-a-box solution developed to quickly and simply create private cloud environments.

The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution manages all components in the Vblock architecture the network, storage, compute and application layers and presents the data in a unified manner so the IT administrator has one holistic view of a data centers health and performance. Nimsoft believes it is the first unified monitoring solution developed for Vblock.

Vblock is a brand-new technology and we feel we are the only company that supports service management and event correlation for Vblocks,” said Chris OConnell, director of product management at Nimsoft.

Vblocks are quickly being adopted in the enterprise and by solution providers as a quick and comparatively simple way to build private cloud environments. Such hybrid on-premises solutions are subject to the same issues as traditional data center environments, however, which is why a unified  monitoring solution is important, OConnell said.

IT now crosses so many different domains. Service providers and companies building Vblocks need to monitor them, but challenge has been the box itself the triage of how these different components work together,” he said. We pull all that data together and see how it all works together. Plus, you can monitor the traditional data center along with the Vblocks,” offering an even more complete view of a data centers performance.

Nimsoft Unified Monitoring is offered as a SaaS offering called Nimsoft on Demand, so service providers can offer the technology as a managed service to their end user customers, regardless of whether they installed the Vblock.

Its a natural fit for our customers. We see a combination of both on-prem and service providers using this, where the customer manages the applications running on the Vblock and the service provider manages the infrastructure. Service providers can just add this into the box when theyre installing it and leave it for activation when the customer wants the service,” he said.

Because it is a subscription-based, on-demand service, it costs nothing to install it, only when its turned on,” OConnell added.

Nimsoft believes it was the first to market with a unified monitoring solution for Vblocks simply because the technology is so new.

It has taken about nine months for the technology to get off the ground with solution providers,” OConnell said. The included tools are good for provisioning, setting up and understanding it is active, but now solution providers are realizing what is missing.

Also, I dont think anyone else did this because the Vblocks were developed by EMC, Cisco and VMWare, so there was sort of an assumption they would take care of everything.”