A Couple of Product Announcements

Thursday, October 16, 2008 in Security, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

I don’t generally post lots of product announcements because I’m just too busy to keep up with everything that’s happening. (Either that, or I’m too lazy. Take your pick.) However, there are a couple of announcements that passed through my Inbox this week that I thought I’d share here.

First, the folks over at VKernel have released the Capacity Analyzer 2.0 product. I spoke with the VKernel team back during VMworld and I like what I’ve seen of their products. Even if you don’t think you need a capacity management tool, have a look at this product anyway.

Second, Altor Networks—of whom I wrote here regarding their VNSA—has released the Altor Networks VF (Virtual Firewall). This product builds upon the functionality of the VNSA to add policy enforcement, i.e., the ability to block traffic. I’ve had the beta running in my lab for some time now, and it’s pretty interesting. I’m a bit miffed that the Altor folks didn’t give me a heads-up on the release before it happened, but I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I just wanted to point out those new product releases. Oh, and along the lines of new products, I’m also working on some more in-depth information on Hyper9′s search-based management product and application virtualization from Xenocode. Stay tuned.

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  1. John’s avatar

    John on Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 2:13 pm

    I have to say that I have been using the Capacity Analyzer product for a while now and the VKernel folks have really made some great improvements in this latest release.

    The best part about that company is that they are talking to there customers and letting the customer requirements drive a lot of the new feature adds.

  2. Chuck’s avatar

    Chuck on Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 10:13 pm

    I have to second what John said. We just recently upgraded to the 2.0 release and it is much improved over the previous release.

    And again I’d second John’s comments about their solicitation of customer feedback. I’ve had many conversations with Rob Bergin about features we’d like to see and we even recently had a conversation directly with the CEO. Many of the suggestions we provided for 1.x release did make it into 2.0, although it still has some shortcomings to be addressed.

    It offers a good holistic insight into the usage/capacity of the whole environment as well as trending and alerting for usage increases, but one thing I’d really like to see are tools to identify where increases in utilization are coming from: were several new VMs added over the period, did a couple VMs increase significantly in utilization, etc.

    That said, it’s been a great help to us and the company has been very responsive from a feedback standpoint as well as tackling the few support issues we’ve had.

    We also recently got access to their Modeler product, but haven’t had an opportunity to explore it much yet.