Trigence is lucky enough to have started out with a blank page a few years back. With enterprise IT looking for new solutions (having survived the millennium intact) it appeared to the founders of Trigence that the 'white space' in the market existed around applications, and application management in particular.

They concluded that the world didn't necessarily need another IT automation solution adding complexity and cost to infrastructure that was complicated enough.

Applications, they concluded, are the drivers of business, and most businesses just don't get enough value and flexibility out of their applications. That's when they decided to empower IT management with the ability to move their applications when, where, and how they want, in response to changing business conditions. That's when they decided to build Trigence AE.

Upon my arrival at Trigence, Donn Rochette our CTO and one of the co-founders, cornered me and said, "Just name an industry and we can pretty quickly list off 5 to 10 different applications that are critical to a business' success in that space." Donn can be pretty convincing about the need for businesses in any space to manage their applications like prized assets. If they don't, they're not likely to maintain any significant competitive differentiation, not to mention customer satisfaction.

Working with him, I quickly came to the conclusion if businesses don't or can't manage their applications like crown jewels; they can quickly become crippled and application management problems will hinder their company's ability to
survive, let alone grow. Just look at the average cost of downtime reported by most companies for key applications. Depending on the nature of the business, the typical dollar cost of an application outage for one hour can range from thousands to millions. For most companies (including ours) that's not chump change.

One of the conversations we'd like to entertain in this blog is, "If applications are what matter to the business, why do so many companies have such difficulty managing them?" Our answer is pretty basic: businesses struggle with managing their applications because they are also burdened with managed the computing infrastructure that supports their applications. So the problem faced by most companies is that they need to spend significant ? make that VERY significant ? amounts of time managing the servers, networks, operating systems, and other technologies that support or enable their applications.

At Trigence we put applications and their dependencies in Trigence Application Capsules to allow them to move server-to-server regardless of the OS version. Moving new, existing or legacy application 'where, when and how you want' is basis of the Trigence approach to application management.

Is better application management the answer? Is server virtualization the key? These are questions Donn and I will be asking, along with asking you to share your thoughts in our 'Thought Capsules' blog.

(Al Liebl is VP Product Management of Trigence)

Posted by [Al Liebl] at [01:11 AM] | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our first blog, we wrote about our free Trigence AE 3.0 Beta for Linux (Solaris is coming this summer). It's an opportunity for 32-bit Linux users to test how easy it is to move one of their applications from one OS version to another, safely and with all its critical dependencies intact.

It's worth mentioning some of its features. First, we've greatly simplified the process for capturing and creating an application in a Trigence Capsule, the entity which makes the application a discreet, mobile object. We've added the Intelligent Discovery capability that identifies candidate files and libraries for proper encapsulation. It works by watching the access patterns of the application when it's running and is found it our re-engineering Capsule Creator.

Second, we've re-engineered the Trigence Capsule Controller which is loaded on each managed server. It can now run in standalone mode, without the need for any additional management servers or consoles. Third, we've added Capsule File Mapping to provide per-file control over how the processes running within a capsule can access files within the capsule and its host.

Lastly we've loaded SOAP interfaces to provide a simple approach to integrate the management of application capsules with existing management tools, such as performance and health monitoring, IT automation and orchestration, software distribution and configuration management, and server virtualization.

The Trigence AE 3.0 beta version supports both 2.4-series and 2.6-series Linux kernels, with testing on Red Hat and Novell SUSE server distributions.

(Al Liebl is VP Product Management of Trigence)

Posted by [Al Liebl] at [01:04 AM] | Permalink | Comments (0)

The timing is interesting from our perspective and also, we hope, from anyone who is scratching their heads about the 'virtualization' space and the flood of recent announcements in last month's LinuxWorld in Boston. Many of the announcements are predicated on OS virtualization as a panacea for the ills of enterprise IT. In his column about LinuxWorld, Steve Shankland of CNET joked that it should have been called 'VirtualizationWorld'.

And the announcements are also coming from storage and chipmakers, not just those who market tools allowing several operating systems to run at the same time on the same computer. The concept of 'storage virtualization' has been around for a few years and course Intel has been making noise about changing its architecture to minimize the performance hit it takes when its burdened with OS virtualization software.

Trigence sees the problem ? and its solution ? from a different perspective. Virtualization vendors can help address OS versioning difficulties, the need for expanded storage, and the ever-present need for improved performance, but we feel the solution should come by reducing complexities rather than increasing them.

That's why Trigence focuses simply on helping our customers move their applications when, where, and how they want, in response to their changing business conditions. Safe, easy and controlled application management and mobility, in our opinion, is the driving force behind keeping a business nimble no matter what its size.

Our current Trigence AE 3.0 beta runs on Linux and our Solaris release (which will have the same funcationality, is coming this summer.

(Al Liebl is VP Product Management of Trigence)

Posted by [Al Liebl] at [12:57 AM] | Permalink | Comments (0)