SilverBack Adds Free Upgrade To Datacenter Enterprise Platform

The free upgrade to Datacenter Enterprise, which is expected within weeks, will reduce the time it takes to run performance audits on groups of servers that have been pooled into a single entity, said Robert Klotz, vice president of technology services at the Billerica, Mass., company. The upgrade also will help solution providers build more stable virtualized server pools for their customers, and ensure that applications run better on them, he said.

“What we are providing is the expertise and toolset to make sure that, for example, a 15-server environment can exist on a two-server system,” Klotz said. When the new capabilities arrive, MSPs that manage virtualized server environments will be able to knock about 25 percent off the time it takes to monitor and calibrate pooled servers and the applications running on them, Klotz said.

Silverback has gathered the individual server readouts of a virtualized group into a single reporting field that gives MSPs the ability to look at the group as a whole, he said. The advantage here is that application performance on virtualized servers can be better understood because the data path is no longer fragmented, and the net result should be higher server capacity utilization, and very likely a reduction in the number of servers needed, he said.

Ian Sutcliffe, president of Champion Solutions Group, an MSP in Boca Raton, Fla., whose managed services are resold by IBM, runs Datacenter Enterprise as an overarching reporting tool that consolidates hardware metering data. Sutcliffe has seen the virtualization upgrade at work and said he strongly endorses it because being able to reduce the number of servers in a network is a win-win for the MSP and the customer.

“Whether you own those retired servers outright or sell off the excess boxes, or even if you leave them in the corner and stop paying the maintenance agreements, you are in dramatically better shape,” he said. Datacenter Enterprise starts at about $28,000.