Zyrion 'Contains' Hybrid Clouds

A specialist in business service management (BSM) and network performance monitoring, Zyrion is beefing up its cloud capabilities with business service container technology enhancements to its Traverse network management platform. Officially created in 2007, when NetScout acquired Network General, the company's roots in infrastructure management go back to 1990, and it currently has more than 100 customers.

Traverse provides correlated, end-to-end network and server monitoring capabilities that link underlying applications and the IT infrastructure to business services. Zyrion's largest Traverse deployment includes 7,000 devices with 400,000 metrics monitored every 5 minutes in multiple data centers globally.

The company has offered container technology and private cloud monitoring previously, but now it is addressing hybrid environments of private and public clouds. It says the dynamic nature and shared aspect of hybrid clouds demanded a more complete solution than traditional approaches to performance monitoring.

Traverse's Business Service Containers (BSCs) make it possible to link business services to the underlying IT infrastructure, and allows understanding of the impact on business services when problems occur within the network. The containers are flexible, automated objects that represent business services in an organization, allowing users to create logical, business-oriented views of the overall physical and virtualized computing network. The company says organizations can define different service level agreements (SLAs) for different containers, create fault-tolerant redundant models within a container and have nested containers with cascading alarms.

Analyst Dennis Drogseth, VP, Enterprise Management Associates, says Zyrion is not quite as famous as IBM but has been around for a while and growing its customer base. "There are a lot of things about them that people really don't know," says Drogseth. "The container model they've had for years is a little analogous to the service model ... you have a service and you want to know what its dependencies are, what are the impacts, and what to manage."He says the container approach lets customers understand all the relationships and have an effective basis for monitoring and diagnosis. "The container approach is very easy to administer, so it lends itself to cloud because it is easily adapted to change."

Zyrion is very broad in what it can monitor, says Drogseth. "I don't think they're broadly understood or appreciated, but their customers do." He says the company is strong in the mid-market, but can scale into the enterprise.

In 2010, the company announced the Traverse Data Center Edition suite and upgraded its network monitoring software featuring Data-Gathering Engine (DGE) extensions that monitor the activity on servers and other equipment at remote data centers and send that data back to system administrators.

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