August 11th, 2008
Virtual Iron 4.4
Tim Walsh, Director of Marketing for Virtual Iron, brought me up to speed on his company’s newest release of its cleverly named product, Virtual Iron. Since we hadn’t spoken in quite some time, we spent the first part of our conversation, telling travel stories, bad jokes and generally having a good time. Then we got down to business. Tim helped me understand the changes and benefits of Virtual Iron’s newest release, Virtual Iron 4.4.
Virtual Iron 4.4 seems to be a logical progression from the last version (see Virtual Iron 4.2 - Increased Support for Production Environments).
Here’s how the company describes the new version of Virtual Iron
LivePower, available with Version 4.4, optimizes data center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer servers and shuts down physical servers that are not running virtual machines, based on pre-defined policies. When virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns on physical servers and LiveMigrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.
Snapshot Analysis
As power consumption and heat production become increasingly important considerations for datacenter facilities managers, suppliers of management software for virtualized environments, such as Virtual Iron, are seeing opportunities to use their datacenter automation/orchestration software in a new way. If a product has the ability to monitor operations and assure that service level objectives and organizational policies are enforced, it is not a big stretch to add the ability to move virtualized resrouces to a smaller number of systems and turn off systems to meet power consumption objectives. Virtual Iron has done precisely this in Virtual Iron 4.4.
This is not a new capability. Suppliers, such as Cassatt, have been playing the “green computing” music for quite some time. When I asked Tim how he would differentiate what Virtual Iron is doing from what the others are doing, his answer was the target markets.
Virtual Iron hopes to distinguish its offering from the others by focusing more attention to the needs of the mid tier (read small to medium size organizations) rather than to those of larger organizations. So, Virtual Iron 4.4 is designed to make software installation, creation of policies and ongoing operations as simple as possible. The product targets the orchestration of hundreds rather than thousands of virtual resources.
If the conversations I’ve had with users of previous versions of Virtual Iron’s software are a guide, this version will also be of great benefit to organizations in the mid tier.
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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