Hyperic Cozies Up to Amazon EC2 Apps

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.