AccelOps takes aim at 'server sprawl'

There is an increasing need among service providers for analysis and reporting about data center availability and performance, not to mention security, change and compliance management.

These tasks are made more complex when IT organizations have to deal with “server sprawl” — very prevalent in virtualized environments. Well-known applications from the likes of VMware and Microsoft do monitoring but tend to be locked in to their own products.

AccelOps recognizes the opportunity in the telecom market, especially for IT organizations within smaller- and medium-sized operators that don’t have the resources and money to buy expensive solutions for managing their sprawling data centers. As a result, today it released AccelOps 2.1 SP for integrated data center and cloud service monitoring in service provider and large enterprise environments. The company is targeting hosting providers, managed service providers and large enterprises striving to address service level agreement compliance with improved efficiency. The California-based vendor recently signed a deal with Belgacom ICT's Data for integrated data center monitoring in the operator’s hosted commercial IT service offering, thus extending its reach into the European market.

The organization is marketing what it calls an all-in-one solution for monitoring many devices and servers. It is also complementary to Vmware’s vCenter and Microsoft’s Operations Manager, thus enabling IT folks to find and monitor a breadth of servers, virtual machines and network nodes.
At the core of the solution is what AccelOps deems “actionable intelligence” and “situational awareness,” for root-cause analysis, resource optimization, service understanding and business impact assessment, reporting and compliance automation, and service reliability and quality.

The solution will be deliverable as virtual appliance software or as a software-as-a-service offering that leverages the AccelOps platform to manage diverse operational data on premise, off premise and in cloud environments.

As stated by Gartner’s David Williams in the AccelOps press release: “Without proper event management, IT operations can be deluged with event storms, numerous false positives and a 'sea of red' on their consoles. Through integration with performance-monitoring, these tools can associate an event with a broader service impact and enable IT operations personnel to proactively address performance-based service degradation issues in line with business priorities."