Visit eG Innovations @ VMworld Barcelona (and next week @ Synergy Barcelona)

Visit eG Innovations at VMworld Barcelona (booth # E503) and take a look at the new performance management platform eG Enterprise 5.6. See live how to pro-actively detect and automatically diagnose performance issues in complex, virtualized environments so you can deliver exceptional performance, user satisfaction, and ROI. And make sure to enter the raffle to win a Google Nexus 7 tablet. And don’t forget to see us next week at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona (also booth #503)!

Egenera Integrates eG Innovations Advanced Cloud Performance Management Solution

eG Innovations and Egenera, a pioneer in management and automation for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, today announced a global technology alliance. The partnership will enable Egenera to incorporate eG Enterprise performance management software into Egenera’s PAN Manager software. The combined solution will give joint customers true end-to-end visibility to more accurately understand performance at every layer of the IT stack and to quickly address issues to ensure optimal service availability for mission-critical business services.

“Today’s enterprises are increasingly under pressure to bring efficiency and performance assurance to complex and dynamic business models especially when utilizing the cloud,” said IDC Group Vice President and GM, Matt Eastwood. “Yet most times, it is difficult and time consuming to pinpoint the cause of slow application performance to determine the root cause of the problem. Enterprises are looking for rapid and accurate diagnosis of performance problems in order to free an IT staff and improve overall service levels.”

Egenera’s PAN management suite provides an infrastructure management solution for physical, virtual and cloud-based environments that enables enterprises to quickly create and benefit from automated and self-service infrastructures. Customers use Egenera products to transform their static IT environments and deliver scalable and reliable IT services. As a result, IT is radically improved and businesses operate with much greater agility.

Together eG Innovations and Egenera solutions allow:

• Greater return-on-investment by automating provisioning, performance management and capacity planning;
• Faster problem identification AND resolution thereby freeing up IT time for more strategic initiatives;
• Better business service availability and performance resulting in more satisfied and pro-ductive users;
• Services to operate at the highest level possible producing fewer headaches for IT;
• Automate the delivery of IT services to meet the needs of a diverse end user community, accurately understand what is happening at every layer of IT and quickly address issues and challenges to ensure optimal availability for mission critical business services.

“We are delighted to be partnering with eG Innovations, a clear leader in the performance management space,” said Pete Manca, CEO of Egenera.  ”In a world of 24×7 mission critical IT services, customers increasingly need the ability to deliver real time performance monitoring, root cause analysis and problem resolution. For our enterprise, service provider and cloud customers, the combination of eG Innovations and Egenera provides the capabilities they need to ensure their business services meet the SLA’s they’ve set.”

To learn more about this strategic relationship, visit eG Innovations at www.eginnovations.com and Egenera at www.egenera.com.

CloudVDI Partners with eG Innovations to Deliver Virtual Desktops in the Cloud

CloudVDI and eG Innovations today announced a partnership in which CloudVDI will use eG Innovations advanced cloud performance management solutions as an integral component in CloudVDI’s Virtual Desktop service. Cloud VDI will also resell eG Innovations products to its Citrix consulting client base to expedite Citrix deployments.

CloudVDI offers a Virtual Desktop subscription service, offering businesses the ability to run Windows OS and compatible software on any CPU and mobile device through CloudVDI’s hosted servers. According to CloudVDI Co-founder Ryan O’Connor, “It’s time consuming and expensive to pinpoint the root cause of a virtualization problem in a timely and accurate manner. We are pleased with eG Innovations capability to automate and accelerate the discovery, diagnosis and resolution of performance issues across our virtual and cloud environments. It was a natural extension to further partner with them to resell their solutions to our clients.”

“Manual performance diagnosis of virtualized IT environments is virtually impossible due to their highly dynamic and heterogeneous nature”, said eG Innovations Co-founder and CEO Srinivas Ramanathan. “Our patented automated technology delivers deep insight into virtual application performance, which is critical for rapid and accurate diagnosis of performance problems. CloudVDI’s integration of our solution in their service offerings is a great endorsement of our capabilities to provide unparalleled support for virtualization initiatives. We are pleased to be partnering with CloudVDI.”

More information

Virtual Desktop and Application Delivery Made Easy – Join the Webinar

Desktop virtualization and remote application delivery promise increased flexibility, scalability and cost savings. But traditional virtualization platforms are often complex, inflexible, and come with a big price tag for licensing and admininstrative cost. And when your virtual desktop users call and complain about performance and slow applications, you are often left on your own to diagnose the root cause and restore service availability.

Does this sound familiar? Then join the webinar “Virtual Desktop & Application Delivery Made Easy” and find out how to make virtual desktops & application deliver easy & cost effective.

Desktop virtualization experts Scott Sims from 2X Software and Srinivas Ramanathan from eG Innovations will discuss how to:

• Virtualize your desktops and deliver applications for a fraction of the cost,
• Reduce management cost while promoting employee mobility,
• Ensure user satisfaction and productivity through built-in performance assurance.

WEBINAR DETAILS

PRESENTERS: Scott Sims (2X Software) | Srinivas Ramanathan (eG Innovations)

REGISTRATION: http://www.eginnovations.com/webinar/2x/

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

VDI Performance Assurance: How to Deliver Virtual Desktop Success

Desktop virtualization is a hot topic. In fact, a recent IDC study showed that 45 percent of CIOs polled indicated that virtualization of the desktop is their number one concern and interest in 2012. But despite the interest and many attempts at deployment, many VDI rollouts fail due to performance and user experience issues. Why?

As organizations move from VDI test and pilot stages to production, they are realizing that the “traditional” approach of treating performance as an afterthought and addressing it in a reactive fashion does not scale. Too often, performance issues surprise VDI project owners during and after rollout, when everything worked just fine during the (often over-provisioned and less complex) pilot.

Focus on the Desktop Often Neglects Backend Infrastructure
Very often, when an enterprise starts on the virtual desktop journey, the focus is on the user desktop. This is only natural; after all, it is the desktop that is moving ‒ from being on a physical system to a virtual machine. Therefore, once a decision to try out VDI is made, the primary focus is to benchmark the performance of physical desktops, model their usage, predict the virtualized user experience and, based on the results, determine which desktops can be virtualized and which can’t. This is what many people refer to as VDI assessment.

One of the fundamental changes with VDI is that the desktops no longer have dedicated resources. They share the resources of the physical machine on which they are hosted and they may even be using a common storage subsystem. While resource sharing provides several benefits, it also introduces new complications. A single malfunctioning desktop can drain resources to the point that it impacts the performance of all the other desktops.

Whereas in the physical world, the impact of a failure or a slowdown was minimal (if a physical desktop failed, it would impact only one user), the impact of failure or slowdown in the virtual world is much more severe (one failure can impact hundreds of desktops). Therefore, even in the VDI assessment phase, it is important to take performance considerations into account and to assess and optimize the entire backend infrastructure supporting virtual desktops.

Consider Performance Assurance Early
In fact, performance has to be considered at every stage of the VDI lifecycle because it is fundamental to the success or failure of the VDI rollout. The new types of inter-desktop dependencies that exist in VDI have to be accounted for at every stage. For example, in many of the early VDI deployments, administrators found that when they just migrated the physical desktops to VDI, backups or antivirus software became a problem. These software components were scheduled to run at the same time on all the desktops. When the desktops were physical, it didn’t matter, because each desktop had dedicated hardware. With VDI, the synchronized demand for resources from all the desktops severely impacted the performance of the virtual desktops. This was not something that was anticipated because the focus of most designs and plans was on the individual desktops.

Understanding the performance requirements of desktops may also help plan the virtual desktop infrastructure more efficiently. For example, known heavy CPU-using desktop users can be load balanced across servers. Likewise, by planning to assign a good mix of CPU intensive and memory intensive user desktops to a physical server, it is possible to get optimal usage of the existing hardware resources.

Lessons from Server Virtualization
Taking this discussion one step further, it is interesting to draw a parallel with how server virtualization evolved and to see what lessons we can learn as far as VDI is concerned. A lot of the emphasis in the early days was on determining which applications could be virtualized and which ones could not. Today, server virtualization technology has evolved to a point where there are more virtual machines being deployed in a year than physical machines, and almost every application server (except very old legacy ones) are virtualized fairly well. You no longer hear anyone asking whether an application server can be virtualized or not. From focusing on the hypervisor, virtualization vendors have realized that performance and manageability are key to the success of server virtualization deployments.

Table above: Lessons that enterprises deploying VDI can learn from the server virtualization experience of the past

VDI deployments could be done more rapidly and more successfully if we learn our lessons from how server virtualization evolved. VDI assessment needs to expand its focus from the desktop alone to the entire infrastructure. Attention during VDI rollouts has to be paid to performance management and assurance. To avoid a lot of rework and problem remediation down the line, performance assurance must be considered early on in the process and at every stage. This is key to getting VDI deployed on a bigger scale and faster, with great return on investment (ROI).

Managing VDI Performance Issues – Best Practices
When VDI performance issues show up, how do you solve them without just throwing more hardware at the problem, killing budgets as well as return on investment (ROI)? When a user calls IT about slow applications, how do you pinpoint the true service performance bottleneck? Is it the network? The profile server? The web? The desktop virtualization platform? Storage?

Some of these issues can be addressed if we look at the lessons learned from server virtualization. Below are some best practices, insight and predictions for VDI deployment success:

Avoid costly issues and remediation downstream – Performance assurance processes affecting the VDI infrastructure need to be built in early in order to avoid costly issues and re-mediation downstream, and to mitigate the risk of VDI failure during deployment. When deploying VDI on a large scale, it is key to avoid slow, manual ad-hoc processes that impact performance. It is imperative that IT considers inter-desktop dependencies from the very beginning.

Move beyond the silo - Today, service delivery is more demanding than ever. Companies require 360-degree VDI service visibility with virtualization-aware performance correlation across every layer and every tier ‒ from desktops to applications and from network to storage. Administrators need deep insights into the causes of VDI service performance issues in order to detect and fix root-cause problems. It is no longer useful to monitor individual silos because of the complexity of today’s infrastructures. There are just too many opportunities for problems.

Engage in Best Practices - Monitor VDI performance, not silos; right-size for ROI; engage in preemptive detection and alerting; monitor users, not only VMs; and have deep visibility into sessions. It is best to approach VDI from this perspective in order to get more return out of VDI investments.

The key to a successful VDI deployment is the ability to automate monitoring and management of the entire VDI service across every tier of the infrastructure stack – from the underlying hardware, network and storage, to the virtualization platform and self service front-end applications. If that end-to-end automated approach is taken, user performance issues can be diagnosed and fixed more rapidly with fewer resources – and even proactively, before users notice.

For more information on how to ensure VDI performance, visit http://www.eginnovations.com

The Desktop Evolution – Join the Live Webinar

Desktop transformation promises to reduce cost, improve reliability, and provide better user productivity. Especially in complex hybrid desktop environments, many organizations are looking to accelerate deployments and improve the desktop experience to deliver business value and accommodate user requirements for personalization, application performance and security.

Join our Live Webinar “The Desktop Evolution – Delivering user satisfaction and productivity in hybrid desktop environments“ on March 21, 2012 and learn from desktop transformation experts Jeff Fisher (RES Software) and Rick Ruskin (eG Innovations) how to:

• Deliver predictable and reliable user experiences
• Provide secure, personalized and compliant desktops across multiple devices, locations and roles
• Proactively manage desktop performance across physical, virtual and cloud environments
• Accelerate the scope of your hybrid desktop deployment

WEBINAR DETAILS

Date: March 21

Time: 2:00 pm (ET) | 11:00 am (PT) | 8:00 pm (CET)

Presenters: Jeff Fisher (RES Software) and Rick Ruskin (eG Innovations)

Register Now (hurry – seats are limited): http://bit.ly/DesktopEvolution

We look forward to seeing you online!

eG Innovations Receives Awards for Best Private Cloud Coverage and Value Leadership in Application Performance Management (APM)

eG Innovations has received two awards for Best Private Cloud Coverage and Value Leadership from IT and data management research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

EMA’s recently released Radar Report™ entitled: “Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud Services” ranks eG Innovations as a cloud performance management leader based on its product architecture, deep integration, ease of administration, deployment and cost advantages. Specifically, eG Innovations has been recognized as the management software vendor with the “Best Private Cloud Coverage” for its superior private cloud management capabilities and very strong support for virtualized environments. eG Innovations also earned EMA’s “Value Leader” distinction among 11 management software vendors providing a multi-component APM solution.

“We are truly impressed with eG Innovations cloud performance management solution,” said Julie Craig, EMA research director. “eG beats out most of the competition in terms of coverage for diverse virtual server environments as well as for its distinctive ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ real-time analytics. The eG Enterprise Suite includes multiple features that one would expect from more expensive solutions; their comprehensive support for virtual environments positions eG Innovations as a leader in terms of monitoring private cloud and public infrastructure as a service environments.”

This award is based on multiple functional capabilities, including:

Comprehensive Virtualization Coverage: eG Innovations supports monitoring, diagnosis and reporting for VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Solaris LDOMs, Solaris Containers, AIX LPARs, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Oracle VirtualBox.

Patented Virtualization / Cloud-aware Correlation & Root Cause Diagnosis: Automatically correlates across metrics from different tiers to identify and fix issues before users call. eG Innovations’ correlation supports the dynamic inter-dependencies, such as VMware vMotions, that come with private clouds and provides deep visibility where traditional tools have limitations.

Universal Agent Technology: Contributes to cost and administration efficiency and delivers maximum deployment flexibility. A single agent is capable of monitoring over 150 applications, 10 different operating systems, and 9 different virtualization platforms.

“In-N-Out” Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring: Delivers both depth and breadth of insight into virtual application performance, a critical criterion for rapid and accurate diagnosis of performance problems. It is the only solution that provides both an outside view of a VM indicating the hypervisor’s physical resources used by a VM and an inside view of the VM indicating which application(s) and user(s) of the VM are causing the resource usage.

To read more about eG Innovations and download the summary of the “EMA Radar™ for Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud Services: Q1 2012 (eG Innovations profile)”, visit http://www.eginnovations.com/cloud.

New Survey Report “Performance Management in Transformational IT Environments”

eG Innovations released the 2012 performance survey report “Performance Management in Transformational IT Environments” – Download here: www.eginnovations.com/survey2012

We asked over 150 IT operations professionals in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific about their performance management preferences and thoughts. The survey results show that companies are having a hard time keeping up with the performance management requirements of virtualized IT infrastructures. Transformational IT technologies like virtualization and cloud computing are changing the way IT services are provisioned and delivered.

While these transformational IT technologies offer significant operational and cost benefits, they also make management of business services much more complex and challenging because of the dynamic nature of the infrastructure. IT operations expect that management systems for their virtualized infrastructure be as automated, agile and easy to use as the virtualized infrastructure itself.

Here are the key survey findings:

• IT operations professionals struggle to manually diagnose root cause problems in heterogeneous service environments – 54% of IT professionals surveyed said their single biggest performance management challenge is identifying the root cause of slow application performance in such heterogeneous environments. IT operations staff can’t tell where the root of the problem is when a user says performance is “slow”: Is it the Network? Server? Database? Virtual Machine? Today’s manual approach to troubleshooting performance issues is woefully inadequate in dealing with the complexity of transformational IT environments. In response, a majority of 67% would like to see performance management solutions that help them automate and accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of performance issues in heterogeneous service environments.
• Managing virtual and physical machines is a challenge – A very high percentage of respondents (53%) are looking for solutions that can manage performance of both virtual and physical machines, as well as the applications running on them, reflecting the new dynamics and inter-dependencies introduced by virtualization layers of IT environments.
• IT wants integrated performance monitoring across all infrastructure tiers – 60% of respondents say they are using multiple, independent performance monitoring tools today – one for the network, another for servers, another for the database and one for the virtualization tier. This fragmented silo approach does not work anymore, and an overwhelming 66% say they are looking for comprehensive solutions that provide answers to cross-layer performance issues.
• Poor service performance impacts customer satisfaction – The #1 business impact of poor IT service performance is decreased customer satisfaction say 53% of respondents. Decreased user productivity (44%) and an increase of IT operations cost (44%) as a result of IT performance issues are of major concern among IT operations professionals.
• IT operations professionals are looking for proactive problem solving – 63% of respondents are looking for performance management solutions that allow them to become more proactive and find problems before they impact the user experience.

Download the full report now: www.eginnovations.com/survey2012

We hope you’ll enjoy the report!

New VDI Webinar: Top-5 Best Practices for Virtual Desktop Success

Join the on-demand VDI Webinar “Top-5 Best Practices for Virtual Desktop Success” (presented by the 451 Group and eG Innovations) and learn how to deliver VDI performance assurance, user satisfaction, and ROI.

Virtual desktop and VDI initiatives promise a variety of benefits – but the underlying IT architecture adds significant complexity and risk. Virtual desktop users expect application delivery to be as fast and reliable as their physical desktop experience. A single failure in the service infrastructure can bring virtual desktop performance to a crawl, and significantly impact user productivity and business processes. And when a user calls about “slow applications”, how do you discover and quickly fix the true service performance bottleneck: Is it the network? Profile server? Web? Desktop Virtualization platform? Storage?

Join the on-demand webinar (http://www.eginnovations.com/webinar/vdi) and learn from desktop transformation experts Karin Kelley (451 Group) and Srinivas Ramanathan (eG Innovations) about the top-5 best practices on how to build scalable performance assurance into virtual desktop environments, and how to provide end-to-end performance visibility across every layer and every tier of dynamic service infrastructures – from virtual desktops to applications, and from the network to storage. Learn how to proactively manage service performance so you can make informed IT operations decisions, move from insight to action, and quickly resolve the root cause of service performance issues – before they impact user productivity and the success of your desktop transformation initiative.

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

Welcoming our New Partner IO Integration

We’re excited that IO Integration, a leading systems integrator specializing in asset management tools and workflow solutions, has selected eG Enterprise as the performance management platform for its new IO Monitor remote monitoring service.

Bill Covington, COO of IO Integration said, “We have evaluated all major performance management solutions and were truly impressed with eG Innovations’ ability to proactively pinpoint performance issues across multiple mission-critical systems, whether they are physical, virtualized or cloud based, and do so before issues impact user productivity and ROI. Our new IO Monitor service now offers true 24x7x365 support and offers total performance visibility across every layer of every tier of our client’s IT infrastructure.”

IO Integration uses eG Enterprise to enable its clients to keep their mission-critical business services running at peak performance, and to deliver tangible ROI to clients undertaking transformational IT initiatives.

This partnership allows IO Integration to expand the range of services offered to clients to include advanced remote performance management, analysis, and reporting of mission-critical systems. It will dramatically accelerate the discovery, diagnosis, and resolution of service performance and user experience issues.