Xangati Launches VDI Performance-Monitoring Platform

Xangati, an IT company with a name that sounds like a character from "The Lion King," on March 24 launched Xangati VDI Dashboard, which tracks and reports on all infrastructure factors that affect the performance of an enterprise's virtual desktop infrastructure.

Xangati, which describes itself as a performance management provider for virtual desktop infrastructure, uses its own memory-based, agentless analytics engine to track and continuously monitor activity of all VDI components within an infrastructure.

Latency and security issues have been the historic Achilles' heels of virtual desktops and thin clients for a number of years. New VDI implementations that have come out in the last couple of years have taken great strides in solving those problems, and Xangati is providing new controls for addressing them.

The company's so-called "performance health engine" automatically alerts administrators in real time about the precise cause of a performance issue, Xangati Vice President of Product Management David Messina told eWEEK.

"We enable enterprises to manage VDI to an operational scale," Messina said. "The virtual desktop is a transformational architecture, and there are a lot of underlying moving parts in that infrastructure. If it doesn't work right—having absolutely nothing to do with VMware or Citrix, other software, or hardware—it has to do with the network and storage. That can really scuttle a project."

Real-Time Alerts Triggered

Xangati gives IT administrators cross-silo awareness into all elements linked to clients, desktops, networks, servers, storage, applications and VDI protocols, Messina said. When a problem anywhere in the system is identified, the software triggers a real-time alert to admins, which in turn generates a DVR recording that enables closer study of why the problem happened.

The DVR then shows exactly where the performance problem started and offers insights about what caused the performance problem, Messina said.

For example, say a user community is seeing obvious delays in screen presentation due to a high-latency network link. This could be caused by someone on the network downloading music files or watching high-definition videos, taking up an inordinate amount of bandwidth. Xangati's system can note and record those music and video instances, Messina said.

These DVR recordings capture issues that are often outside of a VDI vendor's software framework; they then can be passed to the appropriate IT function, such as the storage team, when storage latency is the cause of the performance issue, Messina said.

Traditional Management Doesn't Cut It

"The combination of device evolution, cloud maturity and wireless technology moves VDI from being a nice to have to a need to have," analyst Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group told eWEEK. "It's really the only scalable way to deliver a multi-OS, multi-device, multi-network strategy.

"Traditional management platforms are made for static, physical environments. OpenView, Tivoli and others are archaic dinosaurs that just don't meet the demands of the virtual world. Xangati does," Kerravala said.

"Like [HP's] OpenView was the right product for the client/server computing era, Xangati is the right tool for the virtual computing era. Computing is in transition right now; typically the management of computing trails the computing technology. For companies to have a successful VDI rollout, they really need to address the management challenges now."

Xangati, based in Cupertino, Calif., hasn't exactly been a household name in the IT world, even though it's been in business since 2007.

Originally, the company serviced the telecommunications industry with its vitualization management software, and it still serves more than 100 regional and rural telcos in managing their subscriber experience, Messina said.