Introducing intelligent, end-to-end performance management

Q

Please can you provide some background on Xangati –
when/why formed etc.?
A

At the time, my team and I were working on solutions to combat DDoS and worm attacks in networks. It dawned on us that it was all about real-time at scale and we could solve a huge performance intelligence problem. We created Xangat i initially as a real-time network performance management company and then subsequently added virtualization and cloud environments. Our current solutions provide performance management assurance for virtual workloads and virtual desktop infrastructures.
Q
Who are the key personnel involved, including two key
recent hires?
A

Vasu Vasudevan and I have been involved with Xangati since the beginning as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively. Rosanna Lee is the Chief Architect joined us very early in the company’s life. Our President and CEO, Sundi Sundaresh, recently joined us and is a veteran chief executive of several Silicon Valley start-ups and large companies. Steve Terlizzi is our latest addition as the VP of Global Marketing.
Q
What are the company’s key milestones to date?
A
Xangati has over 300 enterprise customers located throughout North America and Europe. We recently raised over US$10 million dollars of capital funding from a Silicon Valley VC firm and Citrix.
We recently announced our latest XSR-11 release, which extended our lead in workload performance management for virtualized infrastructures. It includes two new powerful dashboards to provide executive-level and customized views into the health of your business-critical infrastructure.
Q
What are the USPs that Xangati brings to the ICT/data centre
space?
A
Xangati provides a live and continuous pulse on the health of the entire virtual infrastructure for intelligent, end-to-end performance management. Our customers can know to the second about the health of all VMs, VDI clients, datastores, hypervisors, networks in their virtual datacenter and be proactive in tracking down performance issues impacting end-user experience. They can track tens of thousands of objects with their hundreds of thousands of interactions every second. We learn from these interactions and correlate these cross-silo metrics to illuminate multi-dimensional performance issues.
Q
What exactly is performance management?
A
With intelligent performance management for workloads and applications customers can measure and understand performance retrospectively and predictively so that performance problems can be anticipated and avoided or identified and remediated if and when they occur.
For example, Xangati’s storm engine has automated heuristics continuously searching for the deadly combination of surging performance metrics and toxic interactions between objects representing dangerous storm patterns. Our customers can see the cause of the storm and which parts of their infrastructure are being affected. With Xangati, they can immediately identify storms with second-by-second insights, proactively track the impact and know how to quickly remediate them.
Q
How does Performance Management fit within the overall
performance management/monitoring landscape, including
things such as Application Performance Monitoring, Network
Management, and Infrastructure Performance Monitoring?
A
Every enterprise has an immediate need to become agile and responsive to market conditions due to consumerization, connectivity and mobility of IT and business. Any infrastructure to support consumer-scale and responsive user experiences must take a fresh look at performance management in this new era enabled by cloud, big data, social and mobile market forces. Whether it is the applications, infrastructure or network, performance monitoring is about presenting data that is collected in a format that is easy to understand. It is necessary for performance management, but not sufficient.

For instance, many customers want to view just a particular application workload, or just the activity of a particular data center, cost center, or department – according to their specific need or preference. They want to have comprehensive aggregated performance index or even create a live view of activity at a particular instant. With real-time customized views built around groups of virtual objects, our customers can better manage application workloads in their virtualized environments.
Q
Why is Performance Management so important right now?
A

Customers are trying to maximize the return on their hardware investment in virtual infrastructures and it always seems like a lose-lose proposition. If they play it safe and add too many resources, they end up with over-provisioning their environment to avoid performance issues. If they try to be aggressive, then the resources always seem to be insufficient resulting in performance contention and degradation.
Performance management helps with this trade-off. For example, Xangati’s unique weighted capacity index, which ensures that customers can achieve maximum capacity utilization without experiencing “contention storms” that could degrade performance and lead to missed service-level agreem ents. By correlating actual performance monitoring of contention storms with capacity utilization, Xangati delivers a single KPI that can indicate when the capacity in IT infrastructures is becoming overleveraged.

Q
Can you provide a brief Xangati product portfolio overview?
A

Over 300 customers use Xangati’s solutions as an intelligent workload performance management solution to gather, process and display real time, second-by-second performance data for virtual desktop (VDI), server virtualization (VI) and network virtualization infrastructures. Our solutions built on patented technology proactively track the health of key IT metrics that impact the performance of applications and users, accurately diagnose the cause of any performance bottleneck and recommend remedial action when a bottleneck is discovered.
Q
Tell us more about these various dashboards?
A
Our dashboard provides our customers with a live to the second awareness of the performance health of all the moving parts within a virtualized environment without requiring any software agents. Using its 360-degree cross-silo approach for live and continuous monitoring, Xangati’s various dashboards monitor all the parts of your mission-critical infrastructure and track the performance health on second by second basis to provide the performance assurances for the most complex virtual workloads.

We provide a proactive performance health index with alerts that come with DVR recordings showing the source of performance problems in high-resolution detail. For example, our VDI customers can experience dramatic improvements in assurance of VDI
end-user experience and a 70% accelerated time to problem resolution improving the productivity of your incident management process.
Q
Can you provide one or two brief customer success stories?
A
Dickson Minto, a leading UK law firm specializing in providing corporate and commercial legal services, uses Xangati VI Dashboard to see everything down to the storage level for their critical document management system. They are able to ensure performance and availability so that their lawyers can access the system whenever they need it.

Another example is Travis Perkins who has been supplying building materials for over 200 years and is one of the largest suppliers to the UK’s building and construction industry with a national network of more than 600 branches. They trust Xangati to provide a clear view of devices, applications and interfaces across their entire whole infrastructure in order to facilitate efficient operation.
Q
What is Xangati’s route to market – direct/Channel/mixture?
A

Xangati sells directly to selected enterprise customers and leverages channel partners through a high-touch model. We have a comprehensive channel program and are actively recruiting partners throughout EMEA.
Q
In terms of both geographical and industry verticals coverage –
what has Xangati achieved to date, and what is there still to
achieve?
A

Xangati has a strong commitment to success in EMEA with sales presences in UK, Benelux, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. In 2014 we will expand our operations into Germany. We have customer across many verticals and, given our emphasis on the VDI marketplace, we have seen particular success in vertical markets where mobility and security have increased VDI adoption, such as Government, Financial, Military, and Healthcare to name a few.
Q
What does StormTracker offer?
A

Even the best run cloud environments are hit by storms of all kinds: storage storms, CPU storms, memory storms, boot storms and many more, crippling applications and disrupting end-user experiences. With StormTracker, our customers can immediately identify storms with second-by-second insights, proactively track the impact and know how to quickly remediate them.

Q
What can we expect from Xangati during 2014?
A

During 2014 you will see Xangati focus more and more on providing increased intelligence to effectively manage your virtualization infrastructures. Today, we use end-to-end, live and continuous monitoring for performance management and assurance of your critical workloads. In the future, we will tie this performance management to increasing knowledge about the applications. You can see this today with our VDI solution.
Q
For someone looking at the whole Performance Management
piece, what one or two pieces of advice would you give them
as to how to get started?
A
Start with your desired business user experience as the primary driver for your requirements. Use business use cases to dictate performance criteria in terms of throughput, responsiveness, resource availability (deployment) and capacity utilization. Then, you can use a real-time, continuous workload performance management solution like Xangati to measure baselines and determine the optimal configuration to maximize the leverage of your available capacity in your infrastructure while minimizing any performance contention issues. This way you can lower your costs and still meet guaranteed service-level agreements.