Press Releases | AccelOps

Momentum has been building for AccelOps. We have are experiencing customer and partner growth, as well as industry recognition. Correspondingly, we have expanded AccelOps solution feature-set and our company infrastructure.

Listening to our customers, we are pleased to release AccelOps v1.6 of our integrated data center management platform. Beyond usability and expanded device coverage, this release advances in four critical areas: virtualization resource oversight, application monitoring via synthetic transactions, hardware monitoring and storage monitoring.

Our prior version earned a Computer Technology Review editor's choice with a review that provided a detailed assessment. Our innovations, as a data center management software start-up, also received honorable mentions. We were finalists in Secure Computing Magazine's SC award for Best Security Startup and the Network Product Guide's Hot Company award for Data Center Solutions. I expect a win is around the corner.

As per company news, we are equally excited about expanding our operations into China with the opening of our first office in Shanghai. The initial engineers and developers will provide additional resources to extend and customize our software, as well as prepare for AccelOps' eventual introduction into China and other Asian regions. We are pleased to have such a qualified and motivated staff as part of the AccelOps family.

AccelOps holistic, integrated and service-oriented approach to data center and cloud service management is the right investment at the right time for the mid-tier enterprise. Please share our news with your peers and stay tuned.

As always, we welcome your suggestions and comments to info@accelops.net.

Regards,
Imin Lee
Co-Founder and CEO

New in AccelOps v1.6

AccelOps version 1.6 is yet again a major release milestone for our company, and among many features, further extending correlated intelligence across all the dynamic cloud service delivery layers.

Multi-Layer Virtual Environment Monitoring - AccelOps extends support for VM monitoring to allow more in-depth visibility into the VMware (ESX) layer, its relationship and movement with the hardware, VM, the guest OS and the application layers. In addition, we added storage and storage network monitoring.

Application Monitoring with Synthetic Transactions - For the first time, AccelOps adds end user performance monitoring via synthetic user transactions, both single and sequenced, for commonly used protocols. Additional monitoring for Microsoft DNS, DHCP, IIS, Exchange, as well as Apache were also added.

Data Center Hardware Monitoring - AccelOps now provides data center monitoring of hardware components supporting leading hardware vendors such as Dell, HP, Cisco and Network Appliance, as well as any hardware running VMware ESX.

We also added device support for IBM AIX and HP-UX, security devices, Nagios migration, and extended compliance support for SOX and HIPAA. Get the details here

SOC / NOW Convergence

IT organizations are cross-training and breaking down operational barriers in order to be more agile and efficient. Spire Security has written an excellent research report on "SOC/NOC convergence: an IT service management approach to security and network operations." This report reviews SOC/NOC convergence trends, reasoning, challenges and implementation considerations. It also examines how advancements in data center monitoring and security information management solutions, such as AccelOps, supports convergence and service-oriented management. Get your copy now

If You Missed Our Audit-ready Data Center Webcast

Given datacenter complexity and cloud computing challenges, auditing by security and operations teams must go beyond basic logging, canned reports and searching event data. This webcast presents the trends, considerations and guidance to support an audit-ready datacenter - examining compliance convergence and the tenets of the audit-ready datacenter, top data center control considerations, log management and SIM constraints, and enabling technologies. Watch the webcast

Editor's Choice

AccelOps was awarded "Editor's Choice" from Computer Technology Review (CTR) based on its usability, depth and breadth of functionality and overall value. Check out the review has been awarded "Editor's Choice" from Computer Technology Review (CTR) based on its usability, depth and breadth of functionality and overall value. Read the complete review

"AccelOps provides a level of integration and resulting correlated data that would be difficult to obtain using other management tools," said Mark Brownstein of Computer Technology Review. "It's a whole lot more efficient to identify, collaborate on and investigate a problem in AccelOps than it is to pore over long lists of events or other types of reports that may be provided by other products."

Customer Profile: Chicago State University

Chicago State University (CSU), Chicago's oldest, fully accredited public university, is composed of five colleges that serve more than 7,200 students and faculty. CSU information technology department, lead by Ce Cole Dillon, supports a central data center, as well as campus computing resources distributed among Health Sciences, Arts and Sciences, Business, Education, Pharmacy and extended learning division. CSU IT manages the data center comprised of HP and Cisco infrastructure connecting more than 150 servers, a SAN and VMware, plus numerous systems campus-wide. Read our other case studies

Requirements
Drivers

Means to respond to problems more efficiently
Better understand infrastructure dependencies and resource utilization
Facilitate IT staff collaboration and skill set flexibility

Considerations

Operational oversight: inventory, system health and incident response
Integration: coverage, scalability and low administrative overhead
Ease of use: usability, built-in features, reporting and customization
Team buy-in: cross-departmental use and value

Why AccelOps
Advantages

Integrated monitoring, rich feature-set including service mapping
Automated CMDB/Inventory and topology mapping
Out-of-the-box use: built-in dashboards, rules and reports
Ease of deployment and the virtual appliance leverages VMware

How Justified

Enables consolidation of resources to support campus
Improves IT service quality and responsiveness
Alternatives would require different modules at greater Total Cost of Ownership

"We brought in five leading vendors to present their infrastructure monitoring platforms, and only AccelOps met CSU's needs for comprehensiveness, usability, implementation and value," said Ce Cole Dillon, chief information officer (CIO) at CSU. "AccelOps' integrated infrastructure monitoring approach met and exceeded our requirements, offering compelling advantages and versatility over alternatives."

Data Center Management / Virtualization Management Dynamics

Virtualization software brings the tremendous benefits of provisioning ease, deployment ease, standardization on hardware architecture, and of course, server consolidation. For these advantages, the IT community is witnessing the rapid adoption and proliferated use of VMs in the data center.

However, a byproduct of virtualization is VM sprawl, VM contention and dynamic network architecture due to vMotion. This greatly intensifies data center management complexity by many levels of magnitude. Now with applications running in a guest OS that constantly moves to different vSwitch or content switching port, due to load balancing and dynamic resource allocation, pinpointing which layer having a problem is extremely difficult. Is there an application problem that is causing the performance problem, or is it the OS layer? How about the ESX layer? But sometimes the problem could be in the vSwitch layer too! Because VM images are stored in the enterprise network storage, trouble shooting the problem would also need to consider the storage layer and the content switching layer.

Given the above virtualization management issues, it becomes more difficult to triage a virtualization issue in a timely fashion and readily know: what is the true problem and where is the problem? If the root cause is due to change, who and what trigged the change? What resource limits have been reached? Where does the VM (and respective OS and application) reside and where/when did it move. And more importantly, what is the impact of excessive VM movement, VM problems or hardware issues to the delivery of IT services.

AccelOps data center management solution cross-correlates information from all layers in the networking stack: information from applications, processes, guest OS, the ESX, the HW, network devices (e.g. a content switch), storage, etc. across performance, availability, security and change management. By doing so, the solution is capable of eliminating many other possibilities in order to efficiently get to the true root-cause. In addition, AccelOps' agent-less approach to data center management / virtualization management makes it non-intrusive and easy to implement.

AccelOps' interactive virtualization dashboard puts critical ESX, hardware, VM, guest OS and application health, key metrics and events at the operator's fingertips - providing immediate means to assess resources, preempt issues and pinpoint the root-cause of sophisticated problems in the dynamic virtual infrastructure.

Armed with this intelligence, AccelOps virtualization management capabilities answers such questions as:

What is our overall VM environment health; ESX server, VM, Guest OS and application performance, availability and security status, issues and trend?
Did a configuration change, patch or VM provision impact business services?
Are resource reservations resulting in VM contention?
Are network or hardware issues affecting ESX performance and availability?
Where is there excessive VM movement?
Are virtualized hardware investments accounted for and optimized?
How are VM and physical resources linked to business services?

Learn more about how AccelOps data center management software complements VMware Vcenter and enables organizations to enhance virtualization management or visit us in the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Customer Profile: Deere-Hitachi

Deere-Hitachi Construction Machinery Corporation (DHCMC) designs and manufactures world-class products for the construction and forestry industry leveraging best-in-class excavator technology. DHCMC was formed in 1988 as a joint venture between Deere & Company and Hitachi. The enterprise is comprised of HP Procurve switches, Cisco security appliances, a Microsoft server and applications environment that is 70% virtualized leveraging VMware, and other business critical applications running on Oracle and SAP.

Deere-Hitachi's IT staff, led by supervisor Trent Steele, serves the product support, engineering and manufacturing organizations across 3 sites in the US and Canada.Read our other case studies

Requirements
Drivers

Consolidate IT management tools
Advance Network and virtualization management
Move from a break-fit to a proactive environment
Security and compliance

Considerations

Performance and VM environment diagnostics plus security information mgmt.
Implementation: ease of use, automation, centralize operational data
Upgrade and replace current tools at lower cost
Facilitate internal SOX audits for compliance

Why AccelOps
Advantages

Automated and unified: turnkey, intuitive, single console/system
Security: the only IT management tool that incorporated SIEM functionality
Business service management: diagnose a service issue or see how a component problem affects an IT service
SaaS: avoid buying hardware, always online, low maintenance

How Justified

Increased IT service reliability - faster resolution of issues
Tool consolidation and optimize virtualization management
Security monitoring and support for SOX audit
SaaS: fast implementation, OpEx budgeting and means to easily scale

"AccelOps provides insight on every aspect of our virtual environment, network, applications and security to quickly track performance metrics, respond to issues and diagnose problems more efficiently - delivering an astounding operational management gain over anything that we had before," said Trent Steele, IT supervisor at DHCMC.

Spread the Word

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and watch a 5-minute animated overview of the AccelOps value proposition. We hope you will spread the word and share our video with your colleagues.

Free 14 day Trial

AccelOps integrated datacenter and cloud service management solution, provides a single pane of glass into IT from a 360° service perspective. The result yields unprecedented enterprise visibility, operational efficiency, service intelligence, reduced MTTR, and resource savings. It's like nothing you have seen before. Do more, control more and save more - right now! Try AccelOps out for a 14-day no obligation evaluation.

FOR MORE DETAILS, PLEASE VISIT - www.accelops.net/tryandbuy.php