Sychron

Billed by the vendor as "Infrastructure Orchestration," the flagship offering from Sychron, Inc. is a platform that provides automated, real-time analysis, management and allocation of server pool resources to applications based on defined business rules and performance goals. The platform itself consists of Distributed Orchestration Modules, each of which resides on a server in the application tier, which together form somewhat of a virtual "operating system" framework with the ability to communicate with one another and coordinate actions applied to the specific server they reside on or the server farm as a whole.

The platform itself operates in real-time, allowing for dynamic analysis and application of resource management decisions for each application. Applications can be auto-detected via the processes they invoke (and the inter-relationships between those processes) and are automatically profiled into an XML-based representation that can be user-edited for fine grain definition and control if necessary.

The general management process employed by the platform follows this five-stage methodology:

- All hardware and applications in the application tier are automatically detected and aggregated into a resource map to be used by the platform.

- The platform auto senses appropriate computer metrics, such as memory and CPU usage, bandwidth consumption, number of flows, and J2EE Mbean data. The DOMs themselves contain an inherent means of collecting this data; and in addition can interface with third party monitoring tools such as Mercury Topaz, Wily IntroScope and Veritas i3. The sensor management functions of the platform are automatically streamlined via the system's ability to retrieve only those metrics needed to enforce actual, existing policies (as opposed to capturing all performance data and filtering out that which is needed).

- Using current and historical data as well as defined policies, specific "effector" actions are triggered by a built in policy engine. This engine features an "Excel-like" language allowing for the construction of condition expressions from values within the aggregated application profiles.

- Triggered actions are further analyzed for purposes of prioritization (again, based on historical data and defined business rules), to prevent conflicting actions from being implemented at the same time or actions related to lower priority apps to take precendence over higher priority apps.

- The actions themselves are implemented, either by directly interfacing the appropriate server resource or by sending appropriate instructions to the desired device. Such actions may include application resource readjustment (CPU, memory, bandwidth), power saving, load balancer and traffic management adjustment, auto-provisioning, etc.

The Sychron platform is available now. Pricing begins at $150,000, which includes everything required for the management of a 48 server pool.