Cloud Expo: Librato's alternative to server virtualization
"If you go with virtualization, you could be paying more than you need to pay," said Librato CEO Fred van den Bosch, in a briefing for Betanews at Cloud Computing Expo in New York City.
Furthermore, the hypervisors typically used in virtualization can produce performance hits of their own, he contended.
Instead, users can achieve server consolidation more cost effectively through workload management products, an advantage that's particularly important during these tough economic times, according to van den Bosch, whose company focuses on this area.
As defined by the Gartner industry analyst group, products in the workload management category allow "diverse workloads to effectively run together in a single instance of an operating system by balancing resource consumption to achieve business goals, especially during peak resource usage periods."
Van den Bosch maintained that Librato's line-up currently optimizes the use of resources such as CPU, memory, and application licenses on both Windows and Linux servers, without requiring modifications to either applications or the underlying OS.
Aside from server consolidation, other applications include job priority management; checkpoint/restart/migration of jobs; and capacity planning and chargeback.
Librato's line-up include Load Manager, for dynamic resource allocation; Load Monitor, for identifying resource bottlenecks at the application level; Smart Suspend, for managing job priorities by "safely suspending" jobs; and Availability Services, for migrating jobs to more available servers and restarting jobs to protect against hardware failure.
The software start-up's major target markets include financial services, the pharmaceutical industry, and digital media and Internet-based companies.
Van den Bosch told Betanews that Librato is now working on expanding its product capabilities to handle management of more types of resources, and to support all hardware used in the data center, including storage devices.
The company is presently beta testing support for Windows Terminal Services, with commercial released expected early in the fourth quarter.
Founded in 2006, Santa Cruz, CA-based Librato currently employs about 55 people, said van den Bosch, who was previously CTO at Veritas.