• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Start-Up Touts Policy-Based Apps Mgmt.

Posted on: Sunday, 24 April 2005, 03:00 CDT

Newcomer OpTier has its sights set on helping network executives better allocate IT resources based on pre-defined policies. The company this week is expected to unveil software that monitors IT components and automates transactions across them based on increased user demands or changing IT conditions.

OpTier, founded in December 2002 and starting off with some $16 million in funding, says its CoreFirst software will help IT managers understand how applications depend on IT components, monitor application and infrastructure elements at the transaction level, and then enable automated actions across multiple platforms to support pre-set policies.

CoreFirst requires IT managers to install a central data repository on a dedicated server and to distribute agents on managed Web, database and application servers. IT managers must set the policies they want the software to use via a Web-based interface, which also serves as a management interface and reporting tool. Once deployed, CoreFirst discovers how applications traverse the network and use the managed devices, and the agents monitor the transaction workloads on the servers.

For example, an IT manager would prioritize the top five applications for the company The agents would monitor the workload on the servers used by those applications, and when a transaction associated with the prioritized applications competed for compute resources with another transaction, the CoreFirst agents would allocate resources to the higher priority applications ahead of other transactions.

One customer considering the product says OpTier could provide him with insight into application transactions. The CIO at a major entertainment company who wished to remain anonymous, says the software could help him set and control policies to ensure optimal application performance in real time.

His network is over-provisioned, in terms of server capacity and bandwidth, to respond to unpredictable changes in application behavior, and he says he'd rather be more appropriately provisioned and use a software product to help him better allocate those resources.

OpTier says its software competes with products from BMC Software, Computer Associates, HP, IBM and Mercury Interactive. But one industry watcher is doubtful and says if the established management companies haven't mastered automation across software platforms and hardware devices, it's unlikely a start-up can do it.

"Anytime resource allocation enters the picture, vendors have to have hardware visibility to activate a hardware change. Not even HP and IBM are at this level yet," says Stephen Elliot, a senior analyst at IDC.

Pricing is based per CPU and starts at about $100,000.

PROFILE: OPTIER

Location: New York

Founded: December 2002

Primary product: CoreFirst, software to manage transaction workloads across different vendors' Web, application and database servers.

Management team: Isreal Mazin, co-founder and chairman; Yori Lavi, co-founder and CEO; Amir Alon, co-founder and CTO.

Funding: $16.1 million from Carmel Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Competition: Established players such as BMC and IBM; fellow start-ups such as Optinuity and RealOps.

Copyright Network World Inc. Apr 11, 2005

Source: Network World

More News in this Category