Progress, Results and Winning Gold

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

The Xangati team received exciting news last week. We learned that our Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) 4.0 won the Gold Award for Virtualization Management in the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Products of the Year.

Winning the top award from an independent panel of judges – including users, editorial staff, analysts and virtualization experts – feels good. But the progress that we’re making as an industry and for users feels great. 

As we move forward, advancing to the next level, everything in virtualization points to progress. A recent IDC survey identifies virtualization as a top priority for CIOs in 2012 – by a landslide with 40% saying server consolidation is their number one priority. (Information Week,  January 11,2012) And in an earlier blog this year, we mentioned Gartner’s numbers – projecting 75% server virtualization by 2015. 

Xangati’s downloads seem to be multiplying before our very eyes and now number more than 6,000! Clearly, IT has realized that virtualization is more than a tactical tool in its arsenal.

But real progress is tied to results. The industry is also recognizing that virtualization management is critical to delivering the results that are needed for virtualization’s successful implementation.

With an extremely complex and intertwined infrastructure that runs across both the physical and the virtual, virtualization represents something new entirely for the data center. And only in understanding its requirements can you deliver the needed management functionality. As explained by Bernd Harzog, Analyst,  The Virtualization Practice,  “…most enterprises have correctly concluded that managing virtualization is so different than managing physical environments that they need new and different products to manage virtualization.”

Harzog also describes how innovators, including Xangati, have take a “clean sheet of paper” approach to addressing virtualization’s management challenges – and the value of this approach – as opposed to simply gluing new or acquired management functionality onto existing legacy frameworks or treating virtualization as “just the latest silo.” The reality is that a new and transformational technology has emerged with entirely new management requirements.

Being acknowledged as “The Product of the Year” for Virtualization Management is an enormous honor for Xangati. The XMD offers many unique performance management capabilities that our team has worked tirelessly to bring to market. And – like the XMD itself – our team is continuously monitoring for new ways to enhance your system’s performance and to make it easier than ever for you to benefit from virtualization.

In choosing the XMD, the judges at SearchServerVirtualization.com highlighted the following management capabilities: our real-time analysis; our visibility into virtual desktop (VDI) infrastructures; our in-depth storage statistics; and the continuous information on the health of the virtual infrastructure provided by our Health Performance Engine.

Yet I attribute our winning to something else – taking out that “clean sheet of paper” and looking closely at all the essential requirements – in order to build the right performance management framework for virtualization – from the very start.