Managing It All By Reflex – Virtualization Performance, Configuration, AND Security

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

We all want to virtualize deeper into our application portfolios, but those darn mission-critical applications are tough to break loose from their rock-solid physical infrastructure. One big problem is that we have long-established, mature and trusted IT management in the physical realm that’s hard to simply replicate in the virtual world. Who knew that being so good at something would become such a problem?

As we journey down the virtualization management maturity path, it seems the common approach is to just continue layering on increments of management capability. It’s as if the virtual server farm beast is alive and growing organically. There are at least two things with many-layered beasts that we have a right to be suspicious about – increasing complexity and spiraling management cost.  

Reflex Systems is claiming that they have a better way with their fully integrated virtualization management approach. It may be an uphill battle to convince skeptics that they can sit in the middle of all management and replace a raft of proven best-of-breed solutions, but Reflex does have a refreshing architecture intentionally designed from the ground up to support integrated management. Their single “platform” solution is designed to support the total management lifecycle of performance monitoring, capacity planning, provisioning and configuration management, and policy-based security all extensible with open API’s both in and out.   

A question I often hear from IT virtualizers is “what is a private cloud compared to what I’m already doing, really?”  I think Reflex provides a big clue here in their integration and implicit optimization across multiple IT management disciplines.

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