Xangati Announces New Cloud Management Functionality in XMD Suite

Xangati, the recognized leader in performance management for virtualization and the cloud, today announced a powerful new release of its Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) virtualization and cloud suite. The new release of the XMD includes capabilities that give enterprises and cloud service providers a huge advantage in performance assurance for virtualized and cloud infrastructures, delivering: a comprehensive, continuous and high-precision performance management architecture now scalable to the cloud; integrated performance and capacity management in one solution; and the ability to performance profile virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) end-user activity without agents. The new release of the XMD also allows organizations to quickly uncover cross-silo contention storms with multi-dimensional and linked alert recordings incorporated into Xangati’s flagship Performance Management Engine.

In addition, Xangati simultaneously announced that all of the new XMD functionality is immediately available at absolutely no cost through integration into its VI Dashboard and VDI Dashboard trial software and the Xangati for vSphere—Free single host tool. Administrators can download and use the free two-week trial within a critical cluster or Xangati’s free tool for a single vSphere host for instant insights on what contention storms are within their environment. Xangati’s software has revealed contention storms in more than 90 percent of its deployments.

“As large enterprises extend virtualization deployments and begin to rely on different cloud models, performance management solutions are falling short in their ability to manage the dynamic nature of these shared environments,” said Alan Robin, CEO of Xangati. “The management capabilities that we’re delivering today fill an immediate need to dramatically improve performance assurance for cloud environments which are plagued by chronic, intermittent contention storms.”

“Our environment is highly dynamic – with students logging in and out from all over campus – making it incredibly challenging to track end-user activity,” said Ron Lee, Senior Systems Engineer at Oral Roberts University, which is using the Xangati VDI Dashboard to support its entire student body of more than 3,200 undergraduate and graduate students. “With Xangati, we can accurately track and profile VDI end-user activity from a single console – a capability that we anticipate rolling out to our entire team to ensure and maximize performance for our students. Plus, with the XMD’s agentless model, we can effortlessly scale management as our environment grows.”

“Moving to a cloud model changes everything in terms of management,” said Todd Scalzott, Director of Information Technology at Kastle Systems, a provider of innovative security systems. “Other management solutions we looked at simply couldn’t deliver for the cloud’s dynamic and shared infrastructure. With the XMD, our team was able to jump right in and start solving problems right away. Supporting our software developers is critical to our business productivity, and the XMD gives us all the right tools so we can.”

Xangati: A Performance Guarantee for Clouds

According to the 2012 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, 63 percent of organizations plan to increase IT budgets for cloud computing initiatives over the next 12 months. The Cloud Era is coming, yet management remains an overwhelming barrier for organizations to maximize its value. Traditional management solutions do not provide the level of precision, continuous insights or scalability needed to manage these environments, resulting in:

  • contention storms affecting system performance that cannot be captured by post-mortem database driven monitoring systems;
  • compartmentalized performance monitoring that doesn’t reveal contention points across the entire infrastructure;
  • a lack of visibility for capacity issues and planning resulting in future contention storms; and an
  • inability to guarantee the dynamic end-user experience (EUX) for VDI.

The XMD architecture was built to solve these issues with live and continuous visibility across all areas of the infrastructure and features the following new capabilities:

Cloud-Scale Performance Management Engine

An 8-fold increase in the scale of environments which Xangati’s patented in-memory performance management engine will cover – without any trade off in precision:

  • delivering second-by-second precision in data collection, collation, analysis and alerts to immediately reveal areas of contention;
  • merging of automated performance profiling techniques with best practice thresholds to uncover multi-dimensional contention storms;
  • linked alert recordings which further accelerate time to resolution; and
  • maintaining full functionality and ease-of-use of the XMD 360° navigational user interface.

Proactive Capacity Management

Integration between the XMD’s performance tracking architecture and new capacity management features, giving customers both capabilities in one solution at one price and:

  • allowing enterprises to proactively identify emerging capacity issues and avoid contention storms before they happen;
  • forewarning organizations through automated alerts when they’re about to hit capacity thresholds across multiple data centers; and
  • locating spare capacity and identifying capacity hogs to give managers the specific information they need to determine where and when they should increase capacity.

VDI End-User Based Performance Profiling for VMware and Citrix

The ability to monitor and track the end user to VM activity without guest agents:

  • giving managers an accurate way to tie user behavior to performance for the very first time;
  • delivering the only solution with both VMware and Citrix connection broker API integration (with direct interaction with ViewConnection Manager and Desktop Delivery Controller);
  • establishing user performance profiles with the highest possible precision by tracking actual activity versus assessment models;
  • alerting the service desk when ‘normal’ user activity changes; and
  • allowing frictionless scalability for future growth with an agentless model.

Additionally, new enhancements have been added to support cross-functional IT teams, with focused dashboards and automated alerts now integrated for the storage team, giving storage admins the ability to track and obtain deeper insights into datastore performance health down to the LUN level.

XMD – Pricing, Availability and FREE trial and vSphere tool
The new XMD suite is available now and is available to test as a free trial to identify contention storms within a targeted cluster. The XMD for VI is priced at $150 per socket. The XMD for VDI is priced at $10 per desktop.*

Xangati for vSphere—Free is also available immediately and includes all of the functionality in the XMD suite for a single vSphere host. Unlike other free tools that target specific silos, Xangati’s offering spans network, storage, server, desktops, clients and applications. Within minutes, organizations can easily download Xangati’s software and benefit from unparalleled insights at absolutely no cost.