Customer Feedback Builds
Midlevel Multiplatform
Application-Monitoring Solution
Howard Reisman, CEO and chairman of
the board of Heroix (http://www.heroix.com), recently spoke with our editors about
how his company meets its customers' application performance-monitoring needs and
how its Longitude product is an example
of Heroix's commitment to listening to its
customers. The company initially created
Longitude, multiplatform application and
system monitoring and reporting software,
to fill what Heroix saw as a major gap in
the application-monitoring market. Low-end products that existed were low-cost,
agentless, and easy to deploy and use but
they only limited OS support, application
coverage, and reporting. Existing high-end
systems offered great multiplatform application coverage and rich reporting features
but required the use of agents and thus were
expensive, difficult to learn, and time-consuming to deploy.
To bring together what it saw as the best
of both worlds, Heroix created Longitude.
The product is agentless, so it's easy to use
and deployment can be immediate. The
product offers multiplatform support and
comprehensive application coverage as well as
rich reporting features. Longitude has had a
quick release cycle; Heroix has released a new
version about every 5 or 6 months, each time
incorporating specific features that customers
asked for. "Heroix is dogged about documenting customer requests and suggestions
as they come in," says Mary Masi-Phelps,
Heroix director of marketing. The features
in the latest release of Longitude reflect the
company's response to growing demand from
customers for more active control of the
information systems administrators get about
their systems, more immediate (real-time)
information, and more ways to distribute that
information to the people who need it.
—Dawn
Time Is Money, and for That
Matter, So Is Space
According to Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Partners at Network
Appliance, Inc. (http://www.netapp.com),
enhancing the value of the data center is a
core requirement for NetApp's SQL Server
DBA customers. These customers want to
cut storage costs and increase storage efficiency, limit the time required for storage
administration, and enhance overall data
center performance. To address these needs,
NetApp offers professional services and software products designed to make the SQL
Server database professional's job easier. An
example is snapshot technology: Rapidly
growing companies or companies that need
to make better use of their existing data can
benefit by including snapshot technology in
their development and testing environments,
as well as on the back end of their decision support applications. However, complexities
can arise when you want to be able to quickly deploy multiple snapshots of a database.
Such deployment can take hours or days,
and the storage requirements can be high.
To help meet these challenges, NetApp
introduced two new products. FlexClone
lets you instantly replicate data volumes and
data sets without requiring extra storage.
SnapManager for SQL Server lets you keep
a close eye on all those new SQL Server
instances.
—Dawn Cyr
A Price-per-Performance Leader Welcomes Difficult Cases
"For better or worse, most of our customers don't call us until they've tried everything
else," says Texas Memory Systems (http://www.texmemsys.com) Executive Vice
President Woody Hutsell. Even after prospective customers approach the company to
learn about its solution, the RamSan-300 solid state disk (SSD), 50 percent of the time
they request an evaluation unit before deciding to buy.
"This makes for a long, expensive sales cycle for us," admits Hutsell, "but we know
that when a customer eventually buys, they're going to be a happy customer."
This commitment to customer satisfaction—and faith in the effectiveness of the
RamSan line—is what has made Texas Memory Systems a long-standing player in the
storage arena.
The RamSan-300 is a storage device that uses Double Data Rate (DDR) RAM memory
instead of hard disks. To the OS, it looks just like a regular disk drive, but the RamSan300 lets applications access storage significantly faster than traditional storage methods
do, accelerating enterprise applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP)
databases, batch processes, and data warehouses by as much as 2,500 percent. The company says the solution is most effective in high-concurrency OLTP environments such
as are found in the fields of finance, stock trading, e-commerce, and federal government
systems. Starting at $28,000, the solution is out of reach for most small businesses. However, Hutsell says "it pays off in price per performance. One unit can equal hundreds of
disk drives. It's a solution that makes sense for small-to-midsized enterprises, or even a
fast-growing midsized company."
—Dawn Cyr