VMware reinforces virtualization, cloud strategy with Log Insight acquisition

Virtualization giant VMware has continued its recent shopping spree to build up the company’s cloud computing capabilities with the acquisition of a big data analytics tool, Log Insight, which is a product from small technology vendor Pattern Insight. VMware is acquiring this single application and the tool’s development team, but not the entire company. Financial details were not disclosed.

The news follows on the heels of two other big acquisitions recently made by VMware. In July, the company announced it was buying DynamicOps, a cloud automation solution provider. The acquisition gives the virtualization giant multicloud, multiplatform, and multivendor management capabilities.

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Later in July, VMware announced a $1.26 billion bid for Nicira, a startup that offers software-defined networking (SDN) technology. VMware officials hope to leverage Nicira’s network virtualization platform to replace traditional hardware networking and build a foundation for cloud environments.

In a recent blog post, Spiros Xanthos, CEO and co-founder of Pattern Insight, said, “Ever since we started Pattern Insight, our vision has been to change how people search, mine, and analyze their vast amounts of IT and engineering data. Log Insight, a log analytics product, is the culmination of our efforts aiming at management and real-time operational analytics for IT data regardless of scale.”

Log Insight is an analytics and log management platform that is designed to analyze in real time the vast amounts of machine-generated data that is created in cloud, physical, and virtualized data center environments and then to guide IT administrators to the root cause of problems. Furthermore, it can also provide insights on emerging trends and hidden patterns that exist within the environment, revealing issues even before they become a problem.

Xanthos is positive about the acquisition and stated, “VMware is ideally positioned in the middle of two of the most important shifts in IT in the recent years: virtualization and cloud computing. It therefore provides the perfect home for Log Insight and the team to continue innovating.”

These types of analytics are important to get a true end-to-end view of the environment. With it, VMware can fill an obvious hole in today’s vCenter Operations Management suite if it chooses to do so.

According to Sanjay Castelino, vice president and market leader at SolarWinds, “What makes this acquisition interesting is the tacit acknowledgement that management can’t be done using data only extracted from the vSphere API. Historically, VMware and others have focused their data center management approach on the VM, host, network, and storage data available through the API. But anyone who’s managed an IT environment knows that’s like running a race with one arm tied behind your back.”

Back in June 2011, SolarWinds acquired TriGeo Network in order to add log and event management software to its own network and systems management portfolio, allowing them to collect data from virtually any device on the network and correlate that data in real time for greater visibility, security, and control.

Castelino added, “SolarWinds has long believed that managing a data center environment is about collecting and correlating data from many sources, from the storage arrays, from the hosts, from network devices, and the application components themselves. Sometimes you gather this data via logs, other times via direct APIs, and where you have common bottlenecks you build management applications around the problem.”

While VMware has confirmed that the transaction is taking place, it has not yet disclosed future plans for the software. The type of analytics that Log Insight provides would greatly benefit a virtual data center and cloud environment. So which of VMware’s products will be closely integrated with the new addition?

There aren’t a lot of details circulating from VMware right now, but hopefully we’ll find out more at VMworld 2012 coming up in San Francisco later this month. After all, doesn’t this sound like a great topic for a futures discussion in one of VMware’s VMworld keynote sessions?

This article, “VMware reinforces virtualization, cloud strategy with Log Insight acquisition,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and networking at InfoWorld.com.