Managing a growing virtualization environment is a challenge for more and more companies, but one that’s easy to put off doing anything about — or spending any money on. VARs know only too well how hard selling IT management software is to the midmarket companies that make up a large part of their calling bases. Storage resource management (SRM) tools garnered a lot of attention several years ago but generated precious few POs for the VARs that were showing these solutions around.

Now it’s server virtualization, and we’re seeing tools for managing these infrastructures as well. But most vendors in this space are taking the same approach that didn’t really work for VARs selling SRM solutions: They’re focusing on enterprise data centers. Embotics is a different story.

Embotics’ V-Commander product is a management tool designed to simplify and automate the VM lifecycle process for midmarket companies that have a growing VMware environment. The pain point this product addresses is the low ROI that many (most?) companies seem to be getting from their virtualization projects. In the midmarket, this is typically due to a lack of time and expertise on IT’s part and the inherent complexity of server virtualization. It’s also due to the problems with storage performance that drive overbuying in the storage infrastructure — something V-Commander is designed to address.

V-Commander is typically up and running in less than an hour. Most customers end up cost-justifying the software right off the bat by identifying wasted resources in the existing VMware environment. This kind of pays-for-itself appeal is great for getting appointments and makes for a compelling demo. For VARs that have a VMware practice, V-Commander is a natural add-on for existing customers. For those that don’t have a VMware focus, this is a good way to get started.

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By trial and error, I’m referring to a process of asynchronous control, where a change or adjustment is made, then a delay, or latency, occurs before you perceive the effect of that adjustment. Can you imagine using trial and error to control many of the things that you do? How about optimizing application performance in an IT infrastructure?

Like the throttle in our car, the volume control on the audio system or an IT network connecting storage and servers, we need real-time feedback in order to be effective in managing something. In the SRM world, most tools provide a level of control not unlike trial and error, essentially performing network and storage monitoring and reporting these isolated data points or averaging them over time.

What’s needed are tools that deliver real-time data about application latency and storage network performance that can tell IT administrators where problems are and what needs to be done to resolve them. In the modern infrastructure, specific data about the transactions between servers and storage are needed to identify where and when bottlenecks are occurring. Without this kind of real-time intelligence, IT often resorts to another form of trial and error, alternately adding storage capacity, network bandwidth and CPU until the problem goes away. The result can be an explosion of a different type — an explosion of underutilized storage capacity.

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