Grid product vendor Voltaire and uXcomm, which develops systems management platforms for systems and device manufacturers, are introducing new products designed to create more flexible data centers.
Voltaire on Sept. 25 unveiled its GridVision Enterprise product, which officials at the Billerica, Mass., company call the missing link in the provisioning and managing of scalable grids.
For its part, uXcomm released its XManage 2.0 offering the same day. The Beaverton, Ore., companys product is designed to bring disparate systems and systems management software onto a common platform, bridging the gap between the myriad systems management software being offered on the market today from the likes of CA, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Voltaires GridVision, by leveraging the I/O and virtualization technology in the companys switches, is designed to unify the disparate server, networking and storage environments within a data center and automate much of the provisioning tasks that many times must now be done manually, said Patrick Guay, senior vice president of marketing for Voltaire.
The product, which currently is in beta testing and will be generally available in December, is designed to reduce provisioning time from days to seconds.
The software uses a GUI and an open Web services-based API to create an environment in which users can quickly assign and connect data center resources based on business demands, Guay said.
The technology doesnt offer new virtualization or management capabilities, but a way of linking offerings already out on the market, he said.
“What were trying to do is unify all these things,” Guay said. “Were not trying to re-create them.”
GridVision Enterprise gives a framework and user interface to help map out the relationship between virtual and physical grid resources—such as service-level objectives, CPU type and network connections—and provides both physical and virtual views of the data center and offers an open architecture that can work with products from multiple vendors.
uXcomms XManage 2.0 is aimed at helping systems makers offer differentiated products that also have the ability to link disparate management software offerings.
For data centers right now, they have a large number of vendors that offer systems management software, not all of which are interoperable, said Craig Wassenberg, vice president of product planning at uXcomm.
Using an XML-driven, SOA (service-oriented architecture)-based approach, uXcomm offers interfaces for major management platforms, an integrated-development environment based on Eclipse and a customizable management services engine that can be used by systems makers.
