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Network General Tackles Growing Need to Manage Virtual Environments

Company Delivers Performance and Availability Monitoring for Virtual and Physical Servers in a Single Analytical Solution

SAN JOSE, Calif.,  May 7, 2007 – Network General™ Corporation, the leading provider of IT Service Assurance solutions, today announced Virtualization Forensics, the next in a series of Business Forensics solutions built on the Network Intelligence Suite. The new Virtualization solution gathers and reports performance data specific to virtual machines from VMware and Microsoft, spanning virtual and physical servers. Business Container™ dashboards correlate this intelligence with performance information from components residing outside of the virtual environment.

“Network managers are finding themselves increasingly responsible for either directly managing application performance or working with non-networking staff to manage enterprise applications,” said Jasmine Noel, Ptak, Noel & Associates.   “Network General’s new capabilities target these application-level responsibilities without losing deep networking insight.  For example, the improved flow analysis across network segments is more valuable because it can be connected to high-level user response-time analysis. Network General is delivering the combination of network and application management, which will improve staff effectiveness and business service performance.”

Aligning Virtualized Resource Performance with Business Service Delivery
The rapid adoption of server virtualization can be attributed to its near- and long-term advantages, which include lower capital, energy, and labor costs in the datacenter.  However, hosting multiple virtual machines on fewer servers often makes performance management much more challenging.  Monitoring tools today are often focused on physical devices, and users must rely on manual processes to correlate application performance across virtual machines, physical servers, and the network. 

Network General’s Virtualization Forensics addresses these challenges by delivering real-time analysis and decision support capabilities to manage IT services that rely on virtual systems, and assures performance of virtualized resources based on the priorities of business services.

Real-time Intelligence Delivers Insight into Virtualized Environments
With the delivery of Virtualization Forensics, Network General provides application monitoring products integrated with traditional packet-level network and application traffic analysis products, yielding an unparalleled view of IT services. The performance of multiple virtualization technologies are viewed across IT domains by powerful web-based Business Container consoles, delivering management and performance information through a real-time view of the overall business instead of narrow technology performance metrics.

Comprehensive application and infrastructure metrics power business-centric views and generate reports and dashboards for multiple levels of virtualization management. Faults are isolated at both the virtual and physical server level, and at-a-glance availability and performance data is comparable across both virtual machines and the business-relevant IT services they underpin.

“Virtualization in today’s datacenter has high awareness, but limited understanding. Until now, most IT managers had limited visibility into the virtualized components and the applications running in the virtual environment,” said Ken Boyd, executive vice president, product delivery. “Virtualization vendors provide capable management based on CPU use and other low-level resource priorities, but none of them assure the performance of virtualized resources with insight into end-to-end delivery of business-relevant IT services.”

View the Network General “Managing Virtual Environments” video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4JCxzAcODA