BlueStripe has introduced the second version of its FactFinder application management software. FactFinder in its 1.0 version could discover and map the dependencies of a Windows application, whether it was running on a physical server or in a virtual machine. Now it can do the same for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications.

"Most applications are experiencing some degree of virtualization," said Vic Nyman, chief operating officer and co-founder of BlueStripe, which announced its product last September before VMware's VMworld. FactFinder establishes baseline measures of responsiveness for applications, whether they're running in a VMware ESX Server virtual machine or a Citrix Systems XenServer virtual machine. FactFinder can track applications that are composed of services to locations on different servers and different virtual machines.

"If an application is performing poorly on a Web server, it can track down who to assign the problem to," said Nyman, with the underlying application server or database server among the candidates.

In the 2.0 version, FactFinder users have told BlueStripe that they most want to see application response time information, which wasn't prominently displayed in the management interface in the first version. "We're raising the application response time up to the top of the product," Nyman noted.

In addition, users will get the ability to drill into some of VMware's ESX Server settings to see more specifics on virtual machine performance.

Microsoft's Exchange e-mail application has always been hard to provision for a two-year period, when the number of users or messages per user may increase during that period. "If you're running out of physical capacity, you can reprovision the virtual machine [assign it more memory, CPU cycles, and network bandwidth] or move it to a larger server" without incurring user downtime or the time-consuming task of reconfiguring a new server for Exchange, Nyman said.

BlueStripe's FactFinder can monitor Exchange and other application operations, set thresholds for response times, and warn system administrators when those thresholds are not being met.

FactFinder 2.0 is available today at a price of $10,000 for a management console managing five servers.

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