Next-Gen Manager

The appliance, which has not yet been named, will provide intelligent, automated systems management from the application perspective, managing and adapting infrastructure based on the applications it supports, said Bob Fabbio, president and CEO of Vieo, Austin.

"Management solutions today don't pay attention to [how the network is being used. They don't manage according to the importance of what applications are running," said Fabbio, a venture capitalist who founded Tivoli Systems, now a unit of IBM, in 1989.

Vieo plans to simultaneously introduce its product and its channel program in January. The appliance should be ready for beta testing in March, with general availability scheduled for the second quarter, Fabbio said.

Pricing has not been established, but Vieo expects initial prices to range from $150,000 to $210,000 per application environment. Each application environment, such as online trading or an ERP system, will require its own Vieo device.

In an approach the company has dubbed Adaptive Application Infrastructure Management (AAIM), Vieo's goal is to enable organizations to measure, analyze and affect the operational characteristics of the application environment, correcting problems before they occur.

"If the technology gains the kind of adoption we potentially see, it will have a large impact on data centers and the way they are managed," said Ed Taylor, CEO of Collective Technologies, an Austin-based solution provider that offers infrastructure management services. Taylor is a member of Vieo's advisory board.

"In an idealized world, every element can be reorganized on-the-fly to meet the demand of uptimes or peak times," Taylor said.

Rather than utilizing the traditional management approach of putting probes into the networking environment to pull information out of systems, Vieo's appliance includes a Layer 2 switch that sits in the data path, Fabbio said.

"We see every communication and analyze all the tiers in the application environment," he said. "Then we can do intelligent measurement and determine what [systems to affect."

The AAIM solution utilizes the InfiniBand input/output architecture to speed connections internally but does not require that the environment it monitors be InfiniBand-enabled, said Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing at Vieo.

The system will include Ethernet ports for incoming traffic, which will be converted to InfiniBand inside the device for processing and then converted back to Ethernet when it exits, Harriman said.

Vieo chose InfiniBand because it includes Quality of Service features, such as the ability to assign different priorities to traffic going over the link based on its importance, he said.

Self-managing technology is a puzzle a number of vendors are trying to solve, said Glenn O'Donnell, program director for service management at Meta Group. "Vieo's challenge will be the age-old argument against automation: There will be people who will view it as a threat to their existence," he said.