Nimsoft aims to monitor VBlock environments

Nimsoft has extended its Nimsoft monitoring product to include the ability to keep tabs on VBlock – the virtualisation package jointly developed by Cisco, VMware and EMC. The new software will enable administrators monitor end-to-end performance of network, storage, compute and application layers within VBlock environments.

The Nimsoft software has been designed to monitor data centres as a whole rather than looking at individual elements within them.

According to Chris O'Connell, director of marketing for Nimsoft UK, the new product was prompted by the move by service providers into private cloud. The big companies are setting up the private cloud and were opting for VBlock. They were looking to add services to VBlock, in particular they wanted to add monitoring and we adjusted the product to extend this unified approach."

NMS offers a range of features including problem notification, intelligent event correlation, automated recovery actions, and full SLA reporting The product also allows administrators to optimise VBlock allocation by notifying them about under-used resources as well as over-use of available network, CPU or disk capacity.

O'Connell said that the company was quick off the mark when it came to offering support for VBlock but things were going to change. "I believe there will be an eco system around Vblock. I think we'll be the first

He acknowledged that VBlock was never going to be a cheap option but pointed out that many organisations were happy to pay for the convenience of the service. "A lot of European companies are stating VBlock in their RFPs," he pointed out. He said that Nimsoft was offering a pay-as-you-go model for its customers to see what they were using within their VBlock environments. He said, however, that the company had not yet finalised pricing so couldn't give a ball-park figure for the monthly charge.