Exclusive: Vieo takes AIM and scores a hit

Managing today's complex datacenter, it’s often difficult to see the forest for the trees. Sure, you can meticulously monitor servers and applications, but given the fragile nature of the environment, application performance can degrade even when individual hosts and databases seem normal.

To address this dilemma, a new IT discipline has emerged called AIM (adaptive infrastructure management). Perhaps today’s best example of AIM is the Vieo 1000 AAIM (Adaptive Application Infrastructure Management) appliance. This new breed of management solution not only understands the whole IT environment — servers, applications, and networks — it also interconnects all these resources so it can reallocate them in near-real time to, for instance, meet unforeseen Web traffic.

The Linux-driven, custom-designed 2U rack-mounted Vieo 1000 appliance includes a controller blade, plus up to two management blades that contain fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet ports. In this standard configuration, you can manage up to 24 hosts or network components; an expansion unit holds four management blades that can scale this solution to 144 management ports.

From the outset, Vieo 1000’s simplicity was apparent. Architecturally, it appears much like a layer-2 switch. As such, anyone with basic networking experience should be able to handle setup. Wiring the mulitplatform test environment and adding the Vieo 1000 to the network took just a morning. You should plan on another few hours to install Vieo Agents (which monitor host, application, and system resources) on application servers. After I installed the agents, the Vieo 1000 successfully discovered all the systems in the test environment and was ready for productive work.

Internally, the Vieo 1000 hardware capitalizes on a high-speed InfiniBand I/O architecture and asynchronous communications. So there wasn’t any noticeable difference in network response after installing the appliance. Moreover, agents required a scant 45MB of memory; on a single-processor Pentium III system, the software consumed less than 2 percent of CPU resources.

Vieo 1000’s application console, a well-designed Java dashboard, gave me a clear-cut view into everything happening within my test datacenter — and a simple way to manage it — from one spot. I clicked on any object (for instance, a Web server) and instantly saw highlighted the associated application server, database, and networking services. This visibility is often missing from standard management tools that monitor individual components.

The Vieo 1000 achieves its highest level of effectiveness by first learning about the datacenter environment, an automated process that runs from a few days to two weeks.

During this time, the appliance adjusts knobs and records gauge settings. The virtual gauges measure the console’s surroundings (such as Web server response time) and the knobs control managed elements (such as the number of application servers). This process yielded an accurate datacenter model, including the role of each application server and the transactions that typified my Web site.

Next I created software templates that the Vieo 1000 applied to provision servers — a simple and quick step. I merely verified that my storefront application was working properly and then specified which directories and files on the reference server would be required to imitate the host.