Vendors Step Up Enterprise Management

Startup Performance IT is launching version 3.1 of its ProIT suite, while BMC Software prepares function-specific modules for its Patrol Express midmarket offering.

Startup vendor Performance IT next week will challenge the big four enterprise management providers in the midmarket space with a new release of its integrated network, system and application management software, but at least one of the big four has a counterchallenge in the works.

Atlanta-based Performance IT Inc., which has seen some success with midsize enterprises thanks to its lower cost and ease of installation, will launch version 3.1 of its ProIT suite.

Meanwhile, BMC Software Inc. is preparing a series of new function-specific modules for its Patrol Express midmarket offering, and Dell Inc., as a result of its alliance with BMC, just released the first PowerEdge servers preloaded with Patrol Express.

The new Dell Patrol Express Server is preloaded with Patrol Express, an agentless monitoring and performance-tuning tool. The server is bundled with configuration support and administrative training, according to BMC officials in Houston, Texas.

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Over the next 12 months, BMC also intends to add more members to the Patrol Express family that individually provide service-level monitoring, application performance monitoring and service impact management for the midmarket.

Performance IT, for its part, extended the server platforms that ProIT can manage to include IBM AIX version 5.x running on IBM pSeries servers.

The latest release also adds a new Impact Analyzer feature that graphically depicts the impact that components of the network have on upstream or downstream network traffic.

Impact Analyzer exploits the tools dependency-mapping engine to visually depict the relationships between network components, streamlining troubleshooting and allowing users to better understand the impact of changes to those devices on applications traffic. It also works with ProITs root cause analysis and can be linked into its automated alarm function.

Performance IT is jumping on a crowded bandwagon with its Impact Analyzer, according to current user Scott Kressner, CIO at Rush Enterprise Inc., a large truck distributor in New Braunfels, Texas.

"That is really application performance from a user perspective. Thats been the panacea everybodys been talking about for five years," he said. Kressner is more impressed with the ease of daily SLA (service-level agreement) reporting the tool provides and the comprehensive management of specific environments provided through the suites Management Packs.

"The rollup of SLA information is extremely easy with the product. They have 80 to 90 percent of it right [on the Management Packs], and wed want to do the last 10 percent ourselves. They did a good job on those," Kressner added.

To read about another tool for boosting SLA management, click here.

ProIT is made up of the Management Center Web server that provides a Web front end and links to a Management Server Engine. Relay components provide centralized monitoring using multiple methods, including SNMP polling, ICMP, transaction monitoring and data collection from server-based agents.

Management Packs automatically configure best-practices monitoring for network and server hardware, performance, capacity and overall distributed system health.

ProIT 3.1, available now, also adds a new tool that allows users to graphically monitor WAN link status and performance.

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