VMTurbo, a virtualization and cloud management startup, believes its recent VCE vBlock certification and support for Red Hat's new Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 release put it in good position to expand its presence in larger companies.
VMTurbo's flagship Operations Manager software keeps tabs on resource levels in virtual and cloud environments and automatically moves workloads as needed to ensure that apps don't become sluggish and bottlenecks don't occur that might impact system performance.
By focusing on the performance aspect of the cloud -- VMTurbo calls it "intelligent workload management" -- Operations Manager fills a niche that isn't sufficiently addressed by traditional management vendors that collect data and use it to troubleshoot problems, VMTurbo CEO Lou Shipley told CRN in a recent interview.
[Related: Emerging Vendors 2012: Virtualization Vendors]
"The differentiator for us is what we do with intelligent workload management. This means running the virtual environment efficiently and guaranteeing application performance. It's hard to do both of these things," Shipley told CRN.
VMTurbo Operations Manager installs as a downloadable software appliance, which analyzes and comes up with a list of recommended actions -- some related to improving performance, others aimed at preventing future problems.
Shipley said organizations can also use Operations Manager to gauge future capacity needs and model their environments accordingly. "You can determine if you need to add more VMs, or add or remove hosts. It shows you what will happen after taking any number of specific actions," he told CRN.
Roughly 70 percent of VMTurbo's business is VMware related, but the company has been expanding its reach. Citrix now uses Operations Manager to manage its XenServer environment, and the recently added support for KVM opens the door to Red Hat as well.
VMTurbo also works with Microsoft and has integrated Operations Manager to allow it to be viewed from within System Center, Shipley said.
British Telecom, one of VMTurbo's largest customers, uses Operations Manager to manage its virtual environment and new cloud service offering, said Shipley.
VMTurbo was founded in 2009 and is based in Burlington, Mass. Shipley joined as CEO last August, and was previously general manager of Xen products at Citrix.
