Zenoss Takes Cloud Management To The Next Level

With clouds forecast for the foreseeable future of the IT world, growing from a $37.8 billion market in 2010 to $121.1 billion in 2015, managing this new environment is critical. According to IDC, the cloud systems management software market will reach $2.5 billion by 2015 (Worldwide Cloud Systems Management Software Forecast and Trends: 2010-2015).

Zenoss is advancing its Datacenter Insight as the first solution capable of analyzing cloud-based infrastructures and providing analytics and reporting of all physical, virtual and cloud-based IT resources. Leveraging the company's data warehouse and model-based management approach, the software provides visibility into the performance and availability of all the physical and virtual devices inside the data center, as well as their relationships and dependencies. Company executives say that they view themselves as making the cloud work.

Zenoss, which develops management software for physical, virtual and cloud-based environments, already has a community of more than 100,000 users. The company adds that its products monitor more than 1 million network and server devices daily and have been used in over 25,000 organizations globally. Zenoss currently has more than 350 commercial customers.

With out-of-the-box analysis capabilities, Web-based ad-hoc report building and executive dashboard creation, Datacenter Insight provides enterprise-grade analysis of the entire IT infrastructure, says Zenoss. It was already capturing detailed information on what was going on in users' IT environments and saw the opportunity to provide tools to offer predictive capabilities.

NETWORK COMPUTING contributor Michael Biddick, CTO, Fusion PPT, thinks Zenoss is a little late to the party. "Those would have been good claims maybe 18 to 24 months ago, but today there are a whole host of vendors that provide that level of visibility. Nimsoft [recently purchased by CA] and RightScale are just two examples of different types of management platforms that span physical, virtual and cloud environments."It's incredibly ambitious and a good challenge for any IT management vendor to provide management analytics over "everything," notes Michael Cote, senior analyst at RedMonk. "In recent times, when it's come to doing virtualization and cloud-based management, newer companies typically lead before larger, incumbent folks. You see this in the cloud space, especially where people like RightScale, CloudKick and others were doing 'cloud management' in a level of detail that traditional vendors are just now getting around to."

With traditional, virtual and now cloud systems, the need to take a data-based approach to managing IT is growing, he says. "We already had a deluge of devices, networks and applications to manage in the physical world, then the virtual world multiplied that. Using cloud resources brings its own growth to that pool of stuff you need to manage, and is also challenging because you can't always use traditional polling and eventing methods for monitoring and management. You're practically forced to start with the big picture with reports and then drill down to the specific red and green lights only when needed. Like I said, this problem has existed forever and it's only gotten worse."

A number of vendors provide data center reporting and analytics as a core part of their "big visions," says Cote. These vendors include Tivoli, BMC, CA and HP. "I think what Zenoss is trying to do is give it a more all-in-one-box feel than the integrated suites you see from some other vendors. If the overall architecture of the system is truly an integrated product, you can avoid the problems you get when you try to strap together existing and acquired products [that now live under one 'roof'], as so often happens in the IT management world."

He says the challenge for Zenoss will be scaling the back end for this system up to meet the large data demands you get when you want to do real, "big data" analytics. "Even large vendors have a tough time doing that affordably. The other issue is bringing the domain expertise to ship with reports that are useful at that scale and for all the different IT management scenarios."

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Eli Lilly on Cloud Computing Reality (subscription required).