A Burlington, Mass., startup last week launched its new approach to managing a complex, n-tiered applications infrastructure with an eye toward helping IT isolate and fix problems that impact performance.
Relicore Inc.s Infrastructure Information Management system offers a better way to track the application infrastructure—including the ongoing changes made to it as well as the dependencies that exist among components.
Relicores tool automatically discovers and dynamically maps dependencies in a real-time tracking system, according to officials. The automated discovery can tell the customer whats running, where its running and how the systems compare.
Relicore officials said that when the application infrastructure breaks down, most of the time is spent gathering the information. That is exacerbated by the increasingly frequent changes made to production systems, which themselves often cause downtime.
In the companys early adopter program, one customer updating 15 servers in part of a Web site got to the 13th server before the change caused an outage. The Relicore tool can help with trouble-shooting such problems by showing what servers are different from the others.
The Relicore software is an agent-based system that uses a central repository to analyze the nature and structure of the applications that are being managed and how they communicate with different, distributed components on other machines.
The agents, once an initial system crawl is completed, are event-driven in communicating any changes they detect.
Relicore faces a number of hurdles in its quest for a foothold in the application management space, said Michael Dortch, an analyst with The Robert Frances Group, in San Francisco.
“IT executives hesitate in committing to new technology. That, coupled with the fact that the Relicore solution is not easily grasped—I think those are the things that represent the most significant challenges,” Dortch said.
Relicore plans to formally launch its tool this summer.