Tideway Launches Foundation 7.3 Significantly Reducing Business Risks Of Data Center Moves
Tideway recently announced the availability of Foundation 7.3, the latest version of its award-winning automated software appliance. Foundation 7.3 discovers all of a business' servers, software, dependencies and business applications, providing a single, automated view of application topology. It takes the cost and risk out of data center migration, consolidation and software license auditing projects. Foundation 7.3 can now automatically group servers into likely business applications without manual intervention. This removes uncertainty from the project planning process, significantly decreasing business risk and reducing the auditing costs of a data center move. An industry first, Foundation 7.3 is also available for a three-month license as a pre-packaged service, enabling companies to easily deploy it on a project basis.
"A major challenge of a data center move is determining which hosts support specific business services. Having this critical information will minimize business disruptions," said Linda Moreira, program director of data center moves at Standard Bank, one of South Africa's largest financial services groups. "Manual audits are one way to capture the information, but they take months to compile and are only partly accurate. With Foundation 7.3, we will get an automatic snapshot of how our servers are grouped together within a matter of days. This information will be invaluable to a successful, timely move."
One of the largest gaps in application dependency mapping tools' capabilities, according to Gartner, is that in many cases they don't have the ability to discover and map automatically "home-grown" or custom-packaged applications. In other words, there's no way to identify which applications depend on which infrastructure, or one another, without significant effort. This is important in data center move or consolidation projects, as a key part of the planning process is working out which groups of servers can be moved safely at once without causing accidental downtime. Foundation 7.3 is the first tool to address that critical need by automatically identifying highly dependent groups of servers. By removing the guesswork, Foundation 7.3 helps to avoid any surprises on move day that may cause severe business disruption and downtime.
Communication during a data center move is critical, particularly for making sure everyone is on the same page and talking about the same infrastructure in the planning process, as well as during the move itself. Tideway Foundation now generates server passports - PDF documents that contain all of the important details about each server in the data center. These can be shared as discussion documents during the planning phase and physically attached to servers in the execution phase.
By making Foundation 7.3 phase zero for data center initiatives, businesses can perform migration and consolidation projects with confidence, ensuring they have an accurate audit and inventory assessment of their IT infrastructure. The introduction of grouping features and server passports transform traditionally labor intensive, manual processes, into completely automated ones.
"We developed Foundation 7.3 to serve as a customer's go-to resource for any data center move," said Adam Kerrison, Tideway CTO. "Such projects can be a daunting task for businesses. If they don't have an accurate inventory, project planning is inaccurate, causing unexpected service disruptions and project overruns - sometimes incurring high penalty fees. With 7.3, we're helping customers to eliminate those risks and more."
For more information on Tideway Foundation 7.3 please visit: http://www.tideway.com.
About Tideway Systems
Tideway is the de facto standard for IT discovery. Foundation is an appliance that discovers your servers, software, dependencies and business applications. This single, automated view of application topology takes the cost and risk out of data center migration, consolidation and virtualization projects, accelerating ROI. Clients include Avis, BT, Carphone Warehouse, Dresdner Kleinwort, ING, Linklaters, Mizuho Bank and Wachovia. For more information, visit http://www.tideway.com.
SOURCE: Tideway