This is one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that tools that is deceptively easy to think about and use, but really, under the hood, has lots of moving parts.
The software-defined data center is a moving target. And, because it is easy to change up a virtual environment, we have no qualms about doing it frequently when the need arises. The constraints that usually slow us down in the physical world - e.g., cost, space, performance, power and network requirements - don't really exist in the virtual world. So, if we need another server, 30 minutes later it's up, provisioned and tested and ready for production. This flexibility generates nearly endless management headaches.
Those headaches are exactly what Intigua was forged to alleviate. It takes the complicated and makes it manageable. An easy way to think about what this product does is to think of it as a management layer that addresses the entire virtual environment: compute, storage and network. As a management layer, it addresses all of the issues that must be administered in a virtual environment: configuration, security, backup and various types of monitoring. The pleasing thing about that is that each resource - or server - is addressed in the unique manner that it needs to be.
So if you are running a particular database management system as the platform for your organized data, the requirements of that database management system are addressed in the manner that they need to be addressed. If there are multiple iterations of that DBMS in your virtual enterprise, the agent is deployed once. That makes this system extremely scalable and, in fact, its most friendly environment is the very large virtual enterprise.
At a glance
Product Intigua 2.6
Company Intigua
Price $300 per server per year.
What it does Virtual management for virtual environments.
What we liked Simplicity of managing complicated virtual computing environments with constantly changing requirements.
