Salesforce

Hyperic today announced HQ 4.0, the next evolution of its systems monitoring and management application. The new release addresses the growing needs of businesses embracing Amazon cloud services to create affordable and scalable IT deployment strategies.

With today’s release, Hyperic HQ is the first software that enables the modern enterprise to monitor its Amazon Web Services securely alongside internal infrastructure. It is also the first enterprise-class monitoring and management software offered for deployment and payment directly though Amazon Web Services.

Datacenters have a fixed capacity for handling application traffic at any given time and distribute resources to match average peak capacity. Businesses deploying in Amazon’s cloud now have access to unlimited number of resources, and pay only for the services they need at any given time. To remain cost-effective, operations teams need to frequently tune web and application server capacity to match fluctuations in demand.

Hyperic HQ 4.0 addresses this need for a new generation of monitoring and management tool that will help enterprises adopt cloud computing strategies with confidence, by better equipping operations teams to perform repetitive management tasks more efficiently. Traditionally, installing a new server and deploying it into production was a lengthy process that took place over days or weeks. Now, with cloud providers like Amazon offering the ability to rapidly deploy servers in minutes and pay by the hour, companies need a way to ensure consistent monitoring oversight of their web operations that is just as fast and flexible.

In developing the new release, Hyperic has drawn upon its extensive experience in providing the automation and visibility needed to maintain application performance in datacenters using virtualization software. Hyperic HQ currently manages over 3,500 VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments. Also referred to as “private clouds,” these environments consist of both physical and virtual servers, and typically support high rates of change as virtual servers are easily added, subtracted or moved to improve server utilization and maintain service levels.

The new Hyperic HQ 4.0 release starts by streamlining the process of adding new software resources into management. After auto-discovery registers the new resources into inventory, a new process of server cloning allows all configuration profiles for log data collection, security and services checks to be immediately applied. Coupled with global alert templates for resource types, the entire system of monitoring and rules for warning of performance problems can be incorporated in under a minute.

In addition, the release also addresses additional areas of concern for virtualized and cloud-based deployment including security, application management and capacity planning. A new server communication protocol allows agents monitoring external resources to always initiate communication with the HQ Server in order to meet to security protocols and operate across firewalls. Despite the uni-directional communication, the agent still maintains a full range of capabilities including the ability to update and run diagnostics remotely, and issue corrective control actions such as a service restart or running garbage collection to free memory.

Additionally, a new capacity planning function automatically analyzes historical performance and projects the future resource trends of any given management metric. This function allows users to quickly assess and predict future trends, and proactively manage capacity needs to anticipate demand or conserve costs.

Also part of the 4.0 release, Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 will be available as a fully configured system on Amazon’s Web Services. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) preconfigured for Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is expected to be available later this month. The new distribution will be available directly on Amazon’s DevPay service for a low initiation fee and a monthly charge based on the amount of management data being collected to the HQ Server. A familiar arrangement to businesses looking to embrace the cloud, there will be no contract term and users will simply pay for how much value they are deriving from the Hyperic HQ Enterprise application.

Hyperic also announced the appointment of Matthew Stodolnic to the newly created company position of vice president of marketing. Stodolnic, who joins the Hyperic executive team after seven years with Salesforce.com, will be responsible for the company’s overall marketing strategy and further expansion into cloud computing.