Hyperic Inc., the leading provider of web application performance monitoring software for the datacenter and the cloud, today announced Hyperic HQ 4.0, the next major evolution of its award-winning systems monitoring and management application. The new release addresses the growing needs of businesses embracing Amazon cloud services to create affordable and scalable IT deployment strategies. With today
’s release, Hyperic HQ is the first software that enables the modern enterprise to monitor its Amazon Web Services securely alongside internal infrastructure. It is also the first enterprise-class monitoring and management software offered for deployment and payment directly though Amazon Web Services.
“Cloud computing and virtualization technologies are making it easier, cheaper and faster to deliver scalable web applications. However, this has made the job of managing these web applications significantly harder. Administrators who are used to managing anywhere from 15 to 50 servers in a single datacenter can now be responsible for 500 or more servers sprawled across their datacenter and beyond the firewall,” explained Javier Soltero, CEO, Hyperic. “With Hyperic HQ 4.0, we’ve delivered the tool web operations teams need to maintain service levels in these environments of massive scale and complexity, allowing them to embrace virtualization and cloud computing with confidence.”
Industry analysts agree that cloud computing is a significant bright spot for growth across the IT industry. In a statement, IDC senior vice president and chief analyst, Frank Gens said that "a recent IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues shows that cloud services are 'crossing the chasm' and entering a period of widespread adoption.” Further, the analyst firm predicts that spending on cloud services will reach $42 billion in the next five years, and will capture 25 percent of IT spending growth in 2012. To meet these growth expectations, adopters of cloud services will need additional tools and updated deployment strategies to succeed. According to the survey respondents, top concerns for adoption include performance level assurances, supporting the need for new monitoring and management tools to help ensure the success of these deployments.
Datacenters have a fixed capacity for handling application traffic at any given time and distribute resources to match average peak capacity. Businesses deploying in Amazon’s cloud now have access to unlimited number of resources, and pay only for the services they need at any given time. To remain cost-effective, operations teams need to frequently tune web and application server capacity to match fluctuations in demand.
Hyperic HQ 4.0 addresses this need for a new generation of monitoring and management tool that will help enterprises adopt cloud computing strategies with confidence, by better equipping operations teams to perform repetitive management tasks more efficiently. Traditionally, installing a new server and deploying it into production was a lengthy process that took place over days or weeks. Now, with cloud providers like Amazon offering the ability to rapidly deploy servers in minutes and pay by the hour, companies need a way to ensure consistent monitoring oversight of their web operations that is just as fast and flexible.
In developing the new release, Hyperic has drawn upon its extensive experience in providing the automation and visibility needed to maintain application performance in datacenters using virtualization software. Hyperic HQ currently manages over 3,500 VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments. Also referred to as “private clouds,” these environments consist of both physical and virtual servers, and typically support high rates of change as virtual servers are easily added, subtracted or moved to improve server utilization and maintain service levels.
The new Hyperic HQ 4.0 release starts by streamlining the process of adding new software resources into management. After auto-discovery registers the new resources into inventory, a new process of server cloning allows all configuration profiles for log data collection, security and services checks to be immediately applied. Coupled with global alert templates for resource types, the entire system of monitoring and rules for warning of performance problems can be incorporated in under a minute.
In addition, the release also addresses additional areas of concern for virtualized and cloud-based deployment including security, application management and capacity planning. A new server communication protocol allows agents monitoring external resources to always initiate communication with the HQ Server in order to meet to security protocols and operate across firewalls. Despite the uni-directional communication, the agent still maintains a full range of capabilities including the ability to update and run diagnostics remotely, and issue corrective control actions such as a service restart or running garbage collection to free memory.
Additionally, a new capacity planning function automatically analyzes historical performance and projects the future resource trends of any given management metric. This function allows users to quickly assess and predict future trends, and proactively manage capacity needs to anticipate demand or conserve costs.
Hyperic HQ for EC2
Also part of the 4.0 release, Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 will be available as a fully configured system on Amazon’s Web Services. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) preconfigured for Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is expected to be available later this month. The new distribution will be available directly on Amazon’s DevPay service for a low initiation fee and a monthly charge based on the amount of management data being collected to the HQ Server. A familiar arrangement to businesses looking to embrace the cloud, there will be no contract term and users will simply pay for how much value they are deriving from the Hyperic HQ Enterprise application.
Availability and Support
Hyperic HQ 4.0 is available now at www.hyperic.com. Hyperic HQ for EC2 will be made available directly through Amazon later this month.
For further details on the new version, see the release notes at: http://support.hyperic.com/confluence/display/DOC/HQ+4.0+Release+Notes
Commercially available directly from Hyperic, the Hyperic HQ 4.0 Enterprise comes with a full set of automation and reporting features as well as technical support directly from Hyperic. For more information on features and support see http://www.hyperic.com/products/hq_for_ent.html or contact sales@hyperic.com.