Recently I read an article by Greg Ness.  A quote from the article, "The virtualization players will be forced to build or acquire application layer and connectivity intelligence as a means of survival."  I couldn’t agree more as the dynamic nature of infrastructure resources (virtual servers, virtual networks, etc.) will test the limits of current tools and processes.

In the past when servers were within the enterprise boundaries there were fewer physical servers and it was easy to maintain a mapping of what applications are running on what servers (static servers) and their interdependencies.  Now with virtualization unless you are running the actual datacenter, from the application owner perspective there is no concept of physical servers.  And because of the virtualization there is no need to run multiple applications on the same server to increase server utilization, applications can run on dedicated virtual servers (server are dynamically allocated).  This is why we believe for application owners to effectively manage the applications we need to raise the management abstraction level from infrastructure centric approach of the past to the application centric approach.  We need to have an application centric approach for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications.  A software which can provision optimal virtual servers, network, storage (storage, CPU, bandwidth, Memory, alt.) resources on-demand and provide automation and ease of use for application owners to be able easily and securely run and maintain their applications will be critical for the success of virtualization and cloud computing.  In short we need to start managing systems for specific applications rather than managing servers and routers.

At Kaavo we are implementing an application centric approach to give the application owners more flexibility, control, visibility, automation, and security from their perspective to the infrastructure resources used by their applications.  Right now we are doing this for virtual servers i.e. providing application centric approach to managing virtual servers and storage, as soon as the virtualization APIs are available for networks we can have a system to manage the entire infrastructure for any given application.  So application owner can see and manage the all resources consumed by their applications.  The resources for a single application can be in one datacenter or in multiple locations anywhere in the world.  Kaavo will provide a simple application centric view of things and provide security and automation to optimally use the resources to make sure application service levels are met.

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