Veritas Softwarehas finished the first major overhaul
to the application performance management (APM) software the outfit
purchased when it acquired Precise Software Solutions in 2003.
Geared to bolster the company’s utility computing effort, i3 7.0 helps IT administrators to compare performance and availability characteristics of large applications over clusters, making sure the proper service level agreements are addressed.
APM makes complex applications management easier, cutting through
availability and performance issues before they impact users and the
business. i3 (made of Insight, Indepth, Inform components) competes on different levels with products from Mercury Interactive, Quest Software and Wily Technology.
But while APM has been a painful enterprise in the past, requiring engineers
to use several vendor management tools to manage applications in disparate IT
environments, i3 7.0 adds key application availability management to the
product where it didn’t exist before.
Tom Mulvehill, an i3 product line manager who joined Veritas via Precise,
said new features in i3 7.0 help administrators thwart application problems
by scheduling synthetic transactions that gauge application availability and
response times to keep systems up 24-7.
Rather than waiting for a network glitch or outage to crash the network,
Muvehill told internetnews.com the software lets administrators
proactively manage the entire hardware and software stacks, from storage and
servers to operating systems and applications.
Other new features include SmartLink Correlation Engine, which uses physical
tags to automate the tracing of real transactions across application tiers
and tracking of service levels, users, and locations for each transaction, and
Expert Tuning Advice, which automatically ranks application performance
tuning opportunities.
As part of Veritas’ strategy to make its various software products work with
each other, i3 7.0 has been more tightly wound with Cluster Server and
Storage Foundation software, letting users collect info from clusters and
files to identify the root cause of service degradation issues.
Such functionality is a hallmark of the Mountain View, Calif., company’s
sweeping utility computing strategy, which proposes simplified data center
management for customers by automating computing systems and charging
customers on a metered, or utility pricing basis.
Like IBM, HP, Sun Microsystemsand others, Veritas has been busy developing that strategy over
the last two years, building or buying components to enable a fluid
on-demand operating environment where customers procure computing resources
“by the drink.”
In that mold, Mulvehill said Veritas has dispatched i3’s complex pricing
model, where customers sometimes paid for more than they were actually
using. i3 7.0 will be offered as pre-defined bundles with a new CPU-based
pricing model to let customers strictly pay for what they need. i3 goes on
sale next month, with pricing for a 4 CPU environment starting at $9,200.