Appliance helps optimize IT asset utilization.
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Press Release Summary:
Able to instantly plug into IT infrastructure, nLayers InSight delivers agentless appliance that automatically uncovers ways to optimize applications and mitigate risks involved in making changes to production environment. It tracks application relationships, dependencies, usage, demand, and service levels over time, transforming data into information used to implement strategic IT initiatives aimed at server and application consolidation.
Original Press Release:
nLayers Launches First Non-Intrusive Application Optimization Appliance that Controls IT Costs and Mitigates Operational Risk
SAN JOSE, Calif. - July 6, 2004 - nLayers, a new startup that provides application optimization appliances, today unveiled the company and its flagship product, nLayers InSight, an agentless appliance that instantly plugs into the IT infrastructure and automatically uncovers ways to optimize applications to reduce IT costs and mitigate the risks involved in making changes to the production environment. nLayers was founded in 2003, is venture-funded and headed by industry veteran, and co-founder of Sanctum Inc., Gili Raanan.
nLayers InSight is a unique application optimization appliance that tracks application relationships, dependencies, usage, demand and service levels over time and transforms this data into actionable information that IT executives can use to successfully implement a range of strategic IT initiatives aimed at IT cost reduction, including server and application consolidation, M&A, and license realization. Once nLayers has optimized an organization's applications and services, it continuously tracks and reacts to changes in the application environment to maintain a highly-tuned and optimized state.
"By providing a high-level view of the relationships between resources within complex, heterogeneous environments, nLayers InSight allows customers to optimize IT asset utilization and allocation," said Joshua Greenbaum, Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting. "This allows nLayers InSight to deliver an immediate cost-reduction benefit to CIOs as well as position them for the delivery of an adaptive, on-demand computing environment."
How nLayers InSight Works
nLayers InSight is a self-contained appliance that connects directly into an IT infrastructure. The agentless appliance can be deployed in under 60 minutes, requires minimal operational training or maintenance, and does not disrupt the application infrastructure in any way. nLayers InSight is completely passive and collects data by listening to and inspecting packets on the network without scanning, spidering or probing.
Once installed, nLayers InSight identifies the intricate relationships between infrastructure components, applications and services. Next, nLayers InSight implements a patent-pending technology to create a detailed, time-based Application Behavioral Model (ABM) that illustrates how and when the components interact with each other and the transactions processed at each interaction.
nLayers InSight continuously monitors the ABM for demand, utilization and behavior changes, and provides policy- based notifications, alerts and recommendations aimed at suggesting ways IT executives can optimize the application environment to reduce IT costs. These change alerts are logged and are accessible through a troubleshooting dashboard.
"Our highly complex, ever-changing IT environment must support critical business initiatives and adapt to frequent changes without impacting the level of service it provides. nLayers InSight is the first product we've found that gives us an accurate picture of how our infrastructure components and business applications relate to and depend upon each other," said Hari Makkala, CTO of People's Bank. "Having this knowledge can dramatically improve our problem response time for current critical business systems while helping us design and implement a more efficient, adaptive application infrastructure. We believe that nLayers InSight will help us realize a significant cost savings."
nLayers InSight was designed with scalability and performance in mind. A single nLayers InSight appliance handles thousands of applications and servers and can keep track of tens of thousands of interdependencies. nLayers InSight can easily scale from a single department to multiple geographically distributed data centers and can reliably handle hundreds of switches in the process.
nLayers InSight Benefits
nLayers InSight allows IT organizations to benefit from:
IT Cost Reduction: nLayers InSight identifies all application resources and their dependencies and usage over time, and suggests ways to lower the total cost of ownership of these applications.
IT Risk Reduction: nLayers InSight enables large organizations to reduce the risks involved in rolling out changes to production environments.
Improved Productivity and Service Levels: Through root-cause analysis nLayers InSight enables faster mean-time-to-repair by isolating and correlating problems to the exact infrastructure or application component that is causing the failure.
"There are plenty of solutions on the market that address application performance in terms of uptime and response time. That is not nLayers' approach," said Raanan, CEO of nLayers. "Our definition of 'application optimization' is built around examining and re-calibrating enterprises so that IT executives have more control over - and can optimize - the costs, risks and resources that make up the 'cost-center' that is today's IT environment."
nLayers SNAPSHOT Application Optimization Service
For CIOs and IT executives that are looking for immediate value and IT cost reduction, nLayers offers its SNAPSHOT managed service. nLayers SNAPSHOT is a complete, packaged service offering for real-time, automated optimization of the application infrastructure. nLayers SNAPSHOT service combines the nLayers InSight solution with a proven methodology to provide customers with an immediate return.
With nLayers SNAPSHOT, IT executives can focus on delivering critical services to the business while nLayers does the work. Full results are delivered in a week, allowing customers to immediately start saving on implementation and operational costs.
Availability
nLayers InSight has already been deployed by IT executives in a range of industries, and is also undergoing pilots in several enterprises. The product and the nLayers SNAPSHOT service are available immediately.
About nLayers
nLayers flagship product is nLayers InSight, an application optimization appliance for IT cost reduction and operational risk mitigation. Unlike other solutions, nLayers InSight is an agentless, non-intrusive appliance that is it easy to deploy and requires minimal operational training and maintenance. nLayers InSight is based on Application Behavior Modeling (ABM), a patent-pending technology that continuously discovers and monitors application components, dependencies and usage within data centers. nLayers' customers use nLayers InSight to optimize applications and reduce the risk and cost involved in strategic IT initiatives such as resource consolidation, license realization, M&A and contract auditing. nLayers also helps customers maintain application optimization by continuously monitoring for changes, conducting impact analysis, and fine-tuning the application environment. nLayers is a privately held, venture-funded startup headquartered in San Jose, California and at www.nlayers.com.
Industry Support for nLayers
"nLayers offers a flexible application optimization solution that yields immediate value. Without installing any additional software, modifying or disrupting our application production environment, nLayers immediately compressed our project schedule by automatically identifying and documenting underused servers and their dependencies. If any IT optimization initiative is to achieve its intended results, IT executives must first understand, model and monitor the application infrastructure so that they can make informed and expedient decisions to lower total cost of ownership while at the same time maximizing IT service levels."
- Alex Sagers, Director of Corporate IT for Interwoven
"The market need for application performance and response time measurement is expanding with the advent of Dynamic Response Environments. This type of dynamic environment requires the ability to manage applications from both a cost and risk perspective. Because nLayers technology is based on a time-based application behavior model, it is well positioned to focus on key customer issues such as IT cost reduction and optimizing application resource allocation."
- Judith Hurwitz, president, Hurwitz & Associates
"nLayers InSight enables us to map our data sources and monitor their usage and demand by individual users and programs. This is a key contributor to the success of our security and compliance efforts."
- Ariel Pisetsky, manager, information security, NetVision
"nLayers' InSight delivers a unique solution to the challenge of managing the costs and risks inherent in today's complex distributed application architectures. nLayers automatically creates and maintains a dynamic, time-based model of application interactions with each other and supporting infrastructure components. The success of IT management initiatives such as change management, consolidation, troubleshooting and resource optimization depend upon these accurate, up-to-date views."
- Richard L. Ptak, Partner and Founder, Ptak, Noel & Associates
