application management

KACE today announced KACE Virtual Kontainers to help companies dramatically simplify the distribution and management of applications. This announcement comes on the heels of new Forrester Business Data Services (BDS) research that reported a whopping 74 percent of small- to medium-sized businesses are looking to desktop and application virtualization to solve their costly PC management challenges.

Application virtualization solutions are notorious for their high cost and complexity. KACE Virtual Kontainers, the first technology innovation resulting from KACE’s acquisition of Computers in Motion, provides users with an easier, faster, and significantly less expensive alternative for creating, deploying, and managing virtual applications. What’s more, KACE offers all these functions via a single, integrated Web-based console. KACE Virtual Kontainers is the newest addition to KACE’s award-winning KBOX family of systems management and deployment appliances and the latest technology innovation that saves customers significant time and money.

With KACE Virtual Kontainers, KACE pushes traditional application virtualization technologies to a new level by extending the benefits beyond the features typically associated with these solutions. Some of the new features of KACE Virtual Kontainers include:

Application Isolation – isolated applications eliminate the need for traditional application installation and removal to avoid the decay that occurs when installing and removing application files over time;
Simple and Fully Automated Creation – KACE Virtual Kontainers are easily created without the need of specialized skills so experienced (and more expensive) personnel need not waste time learning yet another way of doing business;
Centralized Appliance-Based Management – centralized management provides an intuitive Web-based console that allows management of the entire application lifecycle from anywhere via an easy-to-deploy appliance;
Active Metering and Control – in order to better manage the use of applications across a corporate network, active metering enables complete control of where and when applications may be executed based on location, hours used, and even on the number of available licenses to enforce concurrent license limits.

KACE Virtual Kontainers will be generally available in April.

BlueStripe Software, provider of Application Service Management (ASM) solutions for virtualized data center environments, today announced (PDF) the availability of its flagship product, FactFinder. FactFinder enables enterprises to stage, deploy, and manage business?critical applications in virtual data center environments with the same degree of confidence and control as traditional environments.

FactFinder delivers three critical elements of application service management for virtual environments:

• Application Discovery & Mapping – FactFinder offers automatic discovery and topology mapping of
the application connections, processes, and interdependencies allowing for unmatched visibility into
both physical and virtual environments.
• Application?level Health Measurement – By enabling simple drill down into performance indicators
of connections, usage, and application access times, FactFinder depicts the relative health of a
business’ critical applications.
• Automatic Triage of Application & Server Problems – FactFinder’s easy to understand performance
indicators highlight areas of concern, showing where to focus efforts to solve problems and optimize
the supporting IT environment.

FactFinder is the only application management solution that enables enterprises to confidently deploy business-critical applications in virtualized environments. This makes it easy for infrastructure groups to gain visibility into application management and performance in virtual data center environments, including service response times, virtual machine utilization, and cross?server dependencies.

Unlike OS?based or network?based monitoring products, FactFinder measures performance across multi?tier and service?oriented architecture applications regardless of whether they are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors or a mix of physical and virtual environments. This allows enterprises to measure the impact of P2V conversions on business success and make decisions based on intelligent, accurate, and timely information.

KACE Introduces Virtual Kontainers

BlueStripe Software Introduces FactFinder