Hyperic joins RightScale in offering an application management solution for Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud computing offering. The enterprise application is part of Hyperic's HQ 4.0 suite, which is designed to help customers manage the performance of Web applications virtual and cloud computing environments. Hyperic already provides management for the Google App Engine.Hyperic,
which sells software agents to correct performance, configuration and security
issues in physical and virtual computing systems, is cozying up to the Amazon
Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud service.
Hyperic Nov. 11 said it will offer its HQ Enterprise 4.0 suite on Amazon EC2.
Hyperic will offer an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) preconfigured for Amazon EBS
(Elastic Block Storage).
The EC2 distribution will be available later in November on Amazon.com's DevPay service, with Hyperic
charging based on the amount of management data being collected on the HQ
Server.
Why is this so important? Data centers have a set capacity for handling
application traffic and allocate resources to match capacity.
Businesses deploying on the Amazon EC2 cloud, where customers host
applications and other software, can now use Hyperic HQ to tune Web and
application server capacity to match computing requirements with workload demands.
Such management technology is important at a time when cloud computing and
virtualization technology are becoming more prevalent in businesses. While these
technologies may make it easier and faster to serve Web applications to
business customers, they also have made the management of such Web applications
a bigger task.
Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero said in a statement that administrators who are used
to managing 15 to 50 servers in a single data center can now be responsible for
500 or more servers sprawled across the data center and beyond the firewall.
Hyperic HQ, which manages over 3,500 VMware and XenServer virtualization
deployments, aims to solve the chaos of virtual server sprawl.
For example, server management agents in the new HQ 4.0 employ
unidirectional communication to let the agents update and run diagnostics, such
as a service restart or garbage collection, across firewalls without the HQ
Server, Hyperic Product Manager Chip Witt told eWEEK.
This enables agents to reach computing systems regardless of
network topology, which is key for the cloud, as users don't have direct
control over equipment. Previous versions of HQ required bidirectional
communication, which takes longer and can lead to more breakdowns.
Also, after auto-discovery registers the new resources into inventory, new
server cloning in HQ 4.0 allows configuration profiles for checking log data
collection, security and services to be immediately applied. This means
monitoring and warnings of performance problems can be implemented in less than
a minute.
Finally, a new capacity planning function analyzes historical performance on
the fly and projects the future resource trends of any management metric. This
allows users to more quickly assess and predict trends, which helps them better
manage capacity needs at a time when growing computing costs clash with
increasingly tight corporate budgets.
Hyperic's move to ally itself with Amazon.com follows that of RightScale, which released a configuration and management
tool to make it easier for developers to deploy and control servers and images
on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform.
Hyperic in August released a free tool for managing the performance of Web
applications in the Google App Engine cloud computing service.