At VMworld 2010, Precise unveiled Precise for Cloud, a transaction performance management solution designed to ensure quality of service (QoS) for applications running on private cloud platforms at the Global 5000 and their global ISPs.
Precise for Cloud is intended to solve what the company says are most pressing issues facing cloud architects and virtualization managers: application QoS, performance problem isolation, and problem resolution. Now in beta, the product is expected to be generally available before the end of the year.
"Every customer that we see is seriously considering moving their applications to the cloud, some of them to public clouds, some to private clouds, some to some form of virtualization -- everybody is considering it," Zohar Gilad, executive vice president, Precise, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The reason for that is really two-fold -- number one is to improve agility and provisioning, and number two is to cut computing costs. The only question is when." However, he adds, veteran IT executives know that if they move too quickly they are going to be on the bleeding edge and if they move too late they are going to have competitive pressure on their cost infrastructure. "So, no surprise, everybody is considering it and trying to walk the fine line here."
The challenge that customers are facing is that cloud is promising to pull CPU and memory cycles "out of thin air," but there can be pitfalls for applications that are going to run on the cloud, Gilad notes.
For one thing, he says, all the problems that existed before as far as how to scale applications are still out there are on the cloud. "Old problems do not go away because most of these problems have nothing to do with computing resources; they have to do with the design, with unexpected loads, with user behavior." Also, specifically with private clouds, there are two additional concerns that customers have, including the risk of degradation of quality of service during and after the transition to the cloud, which is a dynamic platform that is expanding and contracting based on the demands of the application, as well as the possible adverse impact that inter-application relationships can have on shared resource contention. "These are the three big things that customers are concerned about."
Precise for Cloud is intended to allow IT executives to consistently monitor performance, predict and isolate issues, and over time, optimize applications running on virtual and physical infrastructure. Precise for Cloud delivers deep visibility to transactions executing in the cloud from the perspective of the virtualization layer. Tight integration with VMware vSphere provides visibility through VMware vMotion migrations and automated provisioning/deprovisioning, showing which applications are running and where, and how resource utilization impacts physical and virtual layers.
More information can be found here.