Startup launches new SaaS cloud monitoring solution, RevealCloud

In the IT world, we’re always looking for the next big thing, and for the last year or two, one of those next big things has been cloud computing. Unfortunately, numerous questions around the cloud have been holding it back. There has been general confusion as to what exactly is the cloud, how is it defined, what is it made up of, and why do we need it. But the cloud is becoming better understood, and IDC has reported that spending on public IT cloud services is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27.6 percent from $21.5 billion in 2010 to $72.9 billion in 2015.

To get in on the action, Austin-based startup CopperEgg has announced a $2 million Series A round of funding that it plans to use to expand product development and sales efforts by doubling or tripling its workforce by the end of the year. Today, CopperEgg is also announcing a new product line, RevealCloud, a performance monitoring solution that helps companies accelerate the delivery of applications and services across both public and private clouds.

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As new economics, technologies, and consumption models drive the adoption of cloud computing, CopperEgg says it is addressing one of the biggest challenges IT organizations face in utilizing these services: lack of visibility and control over the infrastructure used to manage them. The company is hopeful that its second SaaS product offering, RevealCloud, will do the trick to solve that challenge.

CopperEgg’s RevealCloud leverages rapid deployment; a highly distributed data collection model; the extreme speed and scalability of a NoSQL schema-free database; and real-time visualization with click-through analytics to provide a modern, purpose-built cloud monitoring solution.

The company claims its latest solution differentiates itself from legacy performance monitoring tools that conduct polling and performance updates every 1 to 5 minutes. Instead, RevealCloud records, analyzes and delivers updates of critical operating and performance metrics every few seconds, and does so across many cloud instances at the same time.

RevealCloud also helps identify both the need for adding more cloud instances in support of changing load patterns, as well as potential opportunities for savings by identifying when you might be paying for more capacity in the cloud than you actually need — a problem cloud service providers may not want to reveal for obvious reasons.

Other key benefits of CopperEgg RevealCloud include:

• Quick and easy installation — as a SaaS offering, there is no installation or configuration required; users just copy and paste a single command into their systems to get up and running
• Supports hybrid cloud environments — including multiple cloud vendors and virtual or physical data center resources
• Uses a higher sampling rate than traditional solutions — speeds up the polling rate and provides deep, rich performance detail

Thanks to that higher sampling rate, you can expect the following results.

• Data amplification — detects performance-degrading spikes (CPU and memory utilization, network I/O, storage capacity, CPU wait index, blocked processes); legacy monitoring solutions cannot because they are averaged out in longer sampling intervals
• Alert acceleration — reduces the time between an event occurring and an alert being sent to the IT/dev ops team
• Resource optimization — provides more accurate auditing and accounting of resource utilization related to cloud-vendor SLAs

“I think it is clear that commoditized computer, network, and storage hardware vendors along with the entire IT industry are experiencing the perfect storm for the cloud,” said Scott Johnson, CopperEgg’s co-founder and CEO. “Those who have seen it coming have already been planning their moves. IBM and HP have already announced and deployed their own public clouds; the telcos have begun acquiring cloud technology companies and cloud service providers; and legacy monitoring companies are trying to reinvent their business models to make a play for the cloud.”

Deploying a service in the cloud is fundamentally different from deploying the same in your own data center:

• You no longer own the physical infrastructure, nor do you have access to tools that manage that infrastructure
• You don’t typically know or care which vendor’s equipment is deployed in the cloud service provider’s data center
• The infrastructure and its management are part of the service you are purchasing from the cloud service provider (CSP)

Johnson also told InfoWorld, “What we have heard from dev ops teams and IT organizations is that they need real-time, fine-grained visibility into performance and resource utilization metrics of their cloud instances to (1) accelerate time-to-deployment/time-to-market; (2) optimize the deployment with regard to OPEX, and (3) validate that CSP SLAs are being met. The business driver is centered squarely on maximizing service availability, while minimizing operating expense.”

What’s interesting to note here is that the company is making the standard edition of RevealCloud a free entry-level product. The free version offers quite a bit of insight and information into the environment that both small and large companies will find refreshing. Companies that need more advanced functionality can easily upgrade to those additional features via a monthly subscription rate that will be based on a tiered-pricing schedule not yet available. However, the company did say that discounts would also be provided with an annual commitment.

This article, “Startup launches new SaaS cloud monitoring solution, RevealCloud,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.