Xtravirt has earned a reputation as a leader in virtualization and cloud technologies, and its consultants regularly work on some of the most complicated environments in Europe.
Xtravirt has also been active in the community, releasing tools and Visio stencils to help clients plan their virtualization processes. Tools like vPi and the Document Downloader are staples in many a virtualization consultant’s armoury.
On February 17, Xtravirt released its first true software product, SONAR™.
Xtravirt CEO Gavin Jolliffe has this to say about SONAR™:
“There are many moving parts in virtual data centers and cloud infrastructure. Keeping on top of the sheer amount of changes and events being recorded as well as the mountain of data being created by monitoring tools is challenging for even the most well-resourced Ops teams. The new SONAR RaaS service is designed to handle the heavy-lifting involved in infrastructure reporting and data gathering and analysis, making it easy for operations and converged teams to have fast, easy to work with, insight into their virtual environments and their interdependent assets, systems and networks. We’ve decided to focus our first SONAR service on VMware vSphere environments as it is the most widely deployed server virtualization platform.”
Sounds good, but what exactly does that mean, and how much will it cost me?
Let’s begin with the first part of that question. At its most basic, SONAR™ is a cloud-based service that allows an organization using vSphere-based infrastructure to monitor and report on forty-nine different assessment points for a virtual infrastructure against recommended industry standard practices. SONAR™ delivers detailed, concise, and visual reports that give prioritized and actionable recommendations for enhancements.
Now, it seems that SONAR™ is a framework, and SONAR™ Reporting as a Service (RaaS) is the first of many such “as a Service” products from Xtravirt.
This is not a product that you can actually purchase. It’s available by annual subscription at a cost of £4740 per annum ($7284.10, exchange rate February 20) or £395 ($608) per calendar month. It’s not cheap for a small shop. The subscription has no reasonable upper limit on licenses—it will handle 8,000 virtual machines, and it’s licensed per vCenter instance. During the subscription period, any enhancements to the product are free. Xtravirt is already working on improved reporting.
We might be looking at the birth of another AppSense, a company that started out as eSoft, a pure Citrix consultancy business in the 1990s and through several rebrands and focus changes that has ended up a darling of the UK technology sector. I don’t know, but that said, you could claim that SONAR™ is a return to one of Xtravirt’s original business foci. Xtravirt started out as a software house, but it sold all its products to what was then PHD Virtual. It has been interesting to watch its journey from start-up to stable company. I will be watching its latest endeavour with interest on behalf of the team.