Soft Solutions has signed on as the New Zealand distributor for Xangati.
Xangati, a three year old company based in California, makes a live monitoring product that attempts to break out of the “silo” model in evaluating virtualised infrastructure performance.
“The virtualisation guy has been the hero for the last five years,” says Xangati's Jaymin Patel, who toured New Zealand with Soft Solutions’ Paul Leslie in early May. “But the challenge is that everyone is pointing the finger saying ‘you’ve got the virtual network, the virtual server, the virtual storage — you name it — if there are any problems, it must be inside that big blob of virtualisation.’ That’s the challenge right now.”
Xangati’s aim is to provide live and continuous views of all the “iterations” that an end user or virtual machine is doing at any point, Patel says, down to the protocol level, for Citrix, VMWare and Windows virtual environments. The idea is to give organisations a more accurate picture of latency, loss and other problems down to the VDI.
“What if it’s network connectivity, what if it’s the storage or virtual infrastructure, or the application running inside the VM?” Patel says. “It’s the connection and everything else that is opaque inside it and it gives you the breakdown of the bandiwdth between client and desktop.”
Native performance monitoring tools, Patel contends, give no indication of what is happening with the application or the end user. During a recent trial, a prospective customer discovered an antivirus program had been mistakenly scheduled to run scripts in the middle of the day, taking up 100 percent of the CPU time and affecting hundreds of virtual desktops. Xangati was able to help the customer identify and correct the problem.
Patel and Leslie both say the product can give resellers a way in to clients for providing onsite managed services and hosted managed services, and accelerating deployment of VDI environments, for companies ranging from “five virtual hosts” up to 10,000 hosts.
“The challenge for us is to understand where it fits with our resellers,” says Leslie.
Xangati does not have 'feet on the ground' in the region and is relying on Soft Solutions to run first level support and primary sales engagements. Leslie says Xangati has been very active in getting into the New Zealand market after only 12 months in Australia.
Patel says it was Soft Solutions' relationship with Xangati’s Australia distributor, TrackITonline that led to the vendor signing on with Soft Solutions.
