Akorri announced a set of new features that help enable cross-domain ITIL process management as part of the company's flagship BalancePoint 2.0 software platform. BalancePoint delivers the infrastructure performance, cross-domain troubleshooting, and capacity management to support ITIL best practices in Service Level, Problem and Incident, Availability, Capacity, and Continuity Management. This new toolset includes Best Practice Analysis, Chargeback Analysis and Storage Capacity Forecasting, and is included in the standard BalancePoint product at no additional charge.

• Best Practice Analysis checks whether IT configurations are operating in accordance with established best practices, and highlights problem areas so that IT managers can address hidden problems in complex virtualized environments before they impact business applications.  Without using agents, BalancePoint collects information about configuration, performance, and utilization across databases, servers and storage systems, and uses a rules engine to check customer configurations against a set of industry-standard and vendor-specific best practices.  In particular, BalancePoint evaluates Oracle database and enterprise storage system configurations to ensure that systems have been deployed correctly and that common configuration problems have been avoided. Violations can be reported on demand or on a regularly scheduled basis.  A BalancePoint Best Practice Analysis report can be automatically emailed to database, system, and storage administrators, or fed into enterprise trouble ticket systems to initiate corrective action.
• Chargeback Analysis provides key utilization metrics across VMware, server and storage resources that can be used to drive operational cost accounting.  In virtualized environments pools of shared resources are created that can be difficult to fairly measure and charge back to end customers. The new chargeback analysis feature leverages BalancePoint's database of information about configurations and utilization levels to identify the resources being used by each application or virtual machine.  BalancePoint provides not only VMware server metrics, but also storage utilization metrics for a wide range of storage vendor platforms. BalancePoint's advanced analytical model correlates system utilization data to specific applications, and provides proprietary Akorri Key Performance Indicators that can form the basis of advanced chargeback methodologies. Chargeback reporting is automatically generated on demand or on schedule for input into enterprise costing systems.
• Storage Capacity Forecasting generates an analysis of when storage capacity allocated to each VM, server, or application will reach a specific threshold or be fully consumed. This capability leverages BalancePoint's configuration database and cross-domain correlation capabilities to roll up capacity utilization trends by VM or server, and is helpful in planning for future growth and storage capital spending requirements.

"ITIL implementations often fail because organizations don't have a single, holistic view of the data center that helps coordinate the ITIL processes across multiple teams and applications," said Stephen Elliot, Research Director at IDC. "Tools that can provide a single, cross-domain view as well as deep drill down analytics of performance in the virtualized data center will best support ITIL best practices."

"Server and storage virtualization have reached critical mass in both small and large data centers, but production-ready tools for making these new technologies work have been a major gap," said Tom Joyce, President and CEO of Akorri. "We built these new capabilities into BalancePoint to help IT managers deploy virtualization in real world data centers. Our goal is to give them the tools they need to get the job done. For IT organizations that are using the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, to formalize their management procedures, BalancePoint can be used to enable changes in workflow and processes that will save time and money. Many companies have already made BalancePoint a key part of their daily activities for performance troubleshooting, capacity planning, and change management."