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Management appliance startup Vieo Inc. earlier this week filled a gap in management for Citrix servers and applications with the next major version of its Web application management device.
The Vieo 1000, which allows users to manage the service levels delivered by Web applications, also includes new monitoring of network routers and switches in a unique “streams management” capability, according to Steve Harriman, vice president of market development at the Austin, Texas, company.
“We can inspect, measure and control the way application requests flow over various segments of the data-center LAN to ensure that critical application requests are received and processed by the target server infrastructure, ahead of low-priority application requests,” Harriman said.
“We can affect the arrival sequence and the processing of the requests. We can define a stream as a set of application requests flowing over the particular segment of the LAN and act as a logical governor on that.”
The streams management capability exploits the fact that the Vieo 1000 sits in the data path and can actively control real-time traffic.
The streams management is key to meeting SLAs (service-level agreements) in a complex data center with a multitiered application environment, said Vieo user Nader Shaterian, CIO at Mariner Systems Inc. in San Mateo, Calif.
“When you get to having an Oracle database supporting multiple instances of various applications, its really important to be able to be within the stream of applications coming to Oracle, to see how the network is being used and to be able to control that and the SLAs tied into the system,” he said.
Vieo also applied its streams management capability to end-to-end management of Citrix environments, which the company found to be “underserved,” Harriman said. Although some tools focus on specific Citrix problems, none provides an end-to-end view or identification of problems across distributed Citrix environments, agreed Mark Ehr, industry analyst with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo.
“Citrixs own management services are based on a postmortem-type analysis,” said Vieo user Noel Levasseur, executive vice president at First American Bank in Elk Grove Village, Ill.
“You have to analyze the data in batch mode after the fact. Its not good for problems happening right now. Others deal with bandwidth, but that wasnt our problem.”
Vieo in its Citrix support instrumented the different components in the Citrix environment—including Citrix software services—and combined that with network and server platform monitoring for an end-to-end view.
“We make sure the streams inside the data center can talk to each other properly. We can see through the firewall to find problems when the Web interface server is in the DMZ,” said David Wilson, vice president of business development at Vieo.
“We show whether this service can talk to that service—not just if a host is up or down. And weve richly instrumented Citrix software services to get real-time alerts if there are problems within the services themselves.”
The streams management capability is available now, and the Citrix support is due out by years end.