Reflex Systems Announces Integrated Capacity Planning and Performance Analytics

Atlanta, Georgia, 8/15/2011 - Reflex Systems, a leader in virtualization systems management solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the new vCapacity module for Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC). Now with vCapacity, Reflex VMC integrates monitoring, performance, capacity, configuration management and security into a single solution, providing real-time visibility, correlation and control across your entire virtual or private cloud environment. In stark contrast to point solutions, VMC with vCapacity allows administrators to spend time planning and solving infrastructure issues, instead of wasting time manually integrating, correlating and reporting activity across multiple products.

“Capacity planning is the next logical step in helping companies move from virtualization as a simple cost-saving tool, to leveraging virtualization to enable the design of next-generation architectures, such as private clouds,” said Preston Futrell, President and CEO of Reflex Systems. “Customers want the ability to visualize current usage and plan for future needs, and they want something that reduces complexity, provides useful and actionable information and comes integrated with their existing systems. With vCapacity, we can now provide these capabilities all from a single management solution, utilizing a system with which customers are already familiar.”

From a single interface and a single logical database, Reflex VMC provides the ability to show historical performance, change tracking, monitoring, capacity, configuration, inventory, chargeback/showback, and security intelligence. The new integrated capacity planning and enhanced performance analytics in vCapacity enable integrated functionality that isn’t possible with VMware vCenter, VMware management products, or point solutions. vCapacity is highly customizable in terms of both presentation of data within the interface, as well as online and offline reporting. This enables organizations to customize capacity planning and performance management to truly meet the individual demands of their organization.

“Capacity planning is a big issue for organizations as they mature in their use of virtualization, especially as they evolve to a private cloud model,” said Rachel Chalmers, Research Director, Infrastructure Management for The 451 Group. “Users are searching for capabilities that make capacity planning more accurate, straightforward and integrated with their existing systems and best practices. Reflex offers them broad functionality that spans multiple management disciplines within the IT organization.”

vCapacity, when combined with the integrated feature sets of the VMC, provides a broad view of capacity and performance analytics in context of the entire virtualized data center. This data-to-dashboard level of integration provides the ability to analyze, forecast and plan infrastructure resources, utilization, efficiency and monitor performance from a holistic perspective and not just a compartmentalized view of your infrastructure. Operations teams may be using resources efficiently based on initial capacity analysis but ongoing management of resources within the broader management of the virtual infrastructure is critical to improve both CAPEX and OPEX efficiency.

With vCapacity now integrated into the VMC, organizations will gain:

• Performance Analysis: vCapacity enables users to detect bottlenecks inside the virtual infrastructure, identify under-provisioned VMs, performance issues of critical applications, and outages allowing administrators to improve the service level for applications and quickly troubleshoot issues.
• Capacity Planning: Capacity and performance analytics are provided in context of the entire virtualized data center federated across multiple vCenters. This provides the ability to analyze, forecast and plan resource utilization, efficiency and monitor performance from a holistic perspective.
• Rightsizing and Remediation: From the same console, customers can view recommendations for proper VM sizing across CPU, memory and storage, and then actually implement changes. They can view snapshots of capacity usage over time, including future forecasting based on prior performance. Through accurate rightsizing and reclamation, users have the ability to maximize capacity while maintaining performance.
• Monitoring & Management Capabilities: More accurate, actionable data empowers users not only to monitor what is going on but also provides the capability to “do” something about it within the same product. Monitoring and alerting certainly provides the information about an issue but the ability to perform management tasks allows the user to take appropriate actions in the context of when the issue occurred, why the issue occurred, what other systems were affected.
• Showback: vCapacity presents the average monthly cost and monthly savings of resources that are being used throughout the virtualized environment. This helps IT administrators manage cost of workloads in the virtual infrastructure and IT budgets to plan for the appropriate resource utilization.
• Web-based Dashboards: Reflex provides a high-level summary dashboard as well as granular targeted dashboards highlighting capacity, contention, latency, inventory, allocation, availability and efficiency. Providing easy-to-use and highly readable interface, vCapacity allows administrators to quickly visualize capacity planning issues, such as:
• Resources (CPU, memory & storage) that are being wasted
• Where resource contention is highest across the entire environment and within clusters
• Physical resource overcommitment usage and trends
• Which VMs are consuming the most resources within a given cluster
• Capacity usage across time, including future forecasting based on prior performance over an extended period of time
• Reporting: vCapacity provides both analytic and executive summary reporting. Users can customize reports with both graphical and text views, set up scheduled reports, and publish via email or other web dashboards.
• Integration: As a single source of truth for all virtual infrastructure analysis, Reflex provides comprehensive context and more intelligence. Access to data stored in the VMC is backed by rich APIs that enable data export and integration with other management systems.
• Comprehensive Historical Data: Historical information about the overall virtual infrastructure enables users to analyze past, present, and future capacity states. Integration of capacity and performance analytics into broader management functionality provides insight into other management domains that may be contributing to performance or capacity issues. Reflex can store low level, high fidelity, real-time, historical performance/capacity and configuration data for long periods of time – federated across all VMware vCenters in the enterprise.
• Scale: vCapacity leverages complex event processing (CEP) technology to enable real-time, high-speed computations needed by the dynamic virtualization environments rather than the typical inefficient batch roll ups. This allows organizations to easily scale as the environment grows and still get accurate performance and capacity analytics in real-time without having to wait hours for some systems to “batch” only to learn there was a major impact on critical applications hours ago.

For further information on the new vCapacity capabilities, visit vCapacity Planning products page.

About Reflex
Reflex Systems is the industry leader in virtualization systems management solutions that integrate management, performance, security, compliance and audit of the virtual environment. Reflex VMC (Virtualization Management Center) provides visibility, correlation, and automation through a single pane of glass. Purpose-built for virtualization, VMC provides the essential tools needed to manage and enforce dynamic infrastructure policy in virtualized data centers and in private cloud. Reflex VMC, in conjunction with vWatch, vTrust, vProfile, and vCapacity, provides infrastructure discovery and visualization, timeline-based management, application/services discovery, network security, performance, configuration management and dynamic policy enforcement. Reflex Systems is based in Atlanta, Georgia and is privately held. For more information, including a trial download of Reflex VMC, visit www.reflexsystems.com. Follow Reflex at http://twitter.com/ReflexSystems and The vCurve Blog: blog.reflexsystems.com.

Reflex Systems is a registered trademark of Reflex Systems, Inc. All other marks are property of their respective owners.

Media Contact
Janice Bedsole
ZAG Communications for Reflex Systems
janice@zagcommunications.com
781.789.6108