MetiLinx, Digital Evolution Tackle On-Demand Web Services Management

The MetiLinx/Digital Evolution Adaptive Web Services Management product combines the automated infrastructure management and virtualization capabilities of MetiLinx iSystem Enterprise 3.1 with Santa Monica, Calif.-based Digital Evolution's Management Server 2.1.5 Web services management product.

The resulting tool--which will be sold through both company's channel partners and direct-sales forces--manages service-level compliance, automated Web services capacity provisioning, Web services load balancing and usage-based Web services billing, said Larry Ketchersid, executive director of service and support at MetiLinx, San Mateo, Calif.

"The major value is that we're providing a management framework that makes Web services more robust by watching for bottlenecks, does auto-provisioning, and provides data about how Web services are getting used as well as the underlying infrastructure," Ketchersid said.

Adaptive Web Services Management can monitor the performance and utilization of multiple instances of a Web service and can automatically provision another instance of the service, adding another server or partition to the infrastructure mix to meet fluctuating capacity needs, he said.

"Since we already know from the MetiLinx side the capacity of the server, and we know from Digital Evolution what the capacity requirement of the Web service is, [we can determine whether] to provision it on an existing server or a new one," Ketchersid said.

The new product, which the companies plan to demonstrate this week at HP World in Atlanta, also offers "tight" integration with Hewlett-Packard's OpenView management software, as well as "loose" integration with management tools from other vendors that support SNMP traps, such as IBM Tivoli, Computer Associates and Microsoft, he said.

MetiLinx and Digital Evolution partners will need to complete additional training but will not require cross-vendor certification to sell the solution, he said.

A typical implementation of Adaptive Web Services Management, available this week, will cost about $150,000, according to the company. It runs on Windows, Unix and Linux and supports both Microsoft .Net and J2EE-based Web services.