Metilinx Inc., along with partner Digital Evolution Inc., plans to fill the Web services management void with a tool that applies utility computing to Web services applications. Officials said MetiLinx/Digital Evolution Adaptive Web Services Management is among the first Web services management offerings to exploit a services-oriented architecture.
MetiLinx brings the ability to correlate and analyze hundreds of performance parameters on a node combined with the ability to virtualize the nodes in real time to create new systems, partitions or groups of nodes that make up a function or service, said Larry Ketchersid, executive director of service and support for the San Mateo, Calif., company. The pair married that ability with Digital Evolutions advanced Universal Description, Discovery and Integration directory, dubbed The Registry, which maintains location, sizing and performance data for Web services.
The benefits are more effective service-level agreement management, faster trouble-shooting of transaction bottlenecks, the ability to meet fluctuating services capacity needs on demand and improved transaction response times via services load balancing, officials said.
MetiLinx officials said the offering offers billing based on the correlation of service-level data and the IT assets used by a Web service. “We can track usage, tie it to a TCP user and send that information to a billing system or [Hewlett-Packard Co.s] Internet Usage Manager mediation system,” said Ketchersid. The MetiLinx/ Digital Evolution Adaptive Web Services Management offering, comprising MetiLinx iSystem Enterprise 3.1 and Digital Evolutions Management Server 2.1.5, works with Microsoft Corp.s .Net and Sun Microsystems Inc.s Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition Web services applications.
The offering is integrated with HPs OpenView tool, letting users run Web services from an enterprise management console. The offering, due this week, costs about $150,000 for a typical installation. It will be available from MetiLinx and Digital Evolution, of Santa Monica, Calif.