It simply amazes me how legacy companies like CA/Nimsoft, would rather reinvent themselves via marketing instead of innovative products. When CA purchased Nimsoft, I wrote, “CA Hits a Homerun and Acquires Nimsoft.” As a funny aside, that blog post almost stopped me from obtaining my current position with Zenoss.
However, over time the reality is CA has simply put Nimsoft in a box while they continue to collect lucrative maintenance revenue from their customers. We have seen Gary Reed exit to another monitoring company, Boundary.com, Nimsoft “acquired” a small/minor hosted ITSM service desk from CA, and Nimsoft has been relegated to a force within the small to medium MSPs outside of North America.
What plagues CA/Nimsoft is an inability to adapt to the new dynamic IT paradigm. Like IBM Tivoli Netcool, CA/Nimsoft was born out of the static days of client server. They are saddled with an old architecture, a reliance on their own agents, and stuck in the world of elemental monitoring.
Nowhere is this more apparent than within CA/Nimsoft’s purported “Top Vendor Available” to monitor Cisco UCS. CA/Nimsoft simply views Cisco UCS as a “turnkey converged infrastructure solution for Cloud stacks.” This view is not surprising given Nimsoft’s current positioning.
In reality, Cisco UCS is a next-generation datacenter platform that unites compute, network, storage, and virtualization into a single system that increases business agility, lowers TCO, and changes the way you design your datacenter. To put it another way, Cisco UCS is by very definition dynamic, which is diametrically opposed to the paradigm for which CA/Nimsoft was designed.
In order to truly instrument and monitor Cisco UCS, you must move away form elemental monitoring and drive toward service management/assurance. It’s not enough to simply be able to monitor Cisco UCS as physical blades and chassis, VMware, and applications and claim to have a unified monitoring platform!
Zenoss not only models Cisco UCS into its individual components, we understand the dynamic relationships between compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. For example, Zenoss dynamically discovers the relationship between an application running as a VM, its host, its storage, its UCS Service Profile, its UCS Blade, and finally its UCS Chassis. If any one of these dynamic components should change, Zenoss automatically discovers the new relationships and monitoring/instrumentation is never interrupted.
Finally, simply displaying events on a console or showing useless pictures on a screen is NOT unified monitoring. For goodness sakes, your monitoring solution cannot be silo’d itself under a unified UI! Also don’t get us started about talking about Cisco UCS only in the context of a vBlock or FlexPod. I’d argue that VCE and NetApp are very different animals and encompass differences other than simply choosing EMC or NetApp storage.
Zenoss is Transforming IT Operations by turning old school monitoring on its head and moving IT operations from a reactive to a proactive stance. Instead of being bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of events, Zenoss provides a service impact analysis of your datacenter enabling true root cause and impact analysis.
Don’t believe me, hear it from Mark Balch and Tom Lasson from Cisco on our Webinar: It’s a New Year. Time to Get Your Datacenter in Shape
Don't Be a #nimFool!
