Toronto-based Lanamark Inc. has updated its flagship desktop optimization suite to help IT shops manage licencing and compliance needs in their Citrix and Microsoft terminal server environments.
The firm, which calls itself an IT-as-a-service software provider, announced the addition of a terminal services analysis component to its Lanamark Suite offering on Thursday. The new component is designed to improve user experience, lower licencing costs and guarantee software compliance by giving enterprises visibility into how and when users are accessing terminal servers and the apps that run on them.
The tool will collect user access data, bandwidth consumption, application usage, and terminal server performance metrics across hosted applications and hosted shared desktops in both Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop and Microsoft Remote Desktop Service environments. The analysis pack also enables the tracking of unique and concurrent users across published apps as well as Microsoft and Citrix licence requirements.
Mark Angelo, CEO of Lanamark, said optimizing application and desktop delivery across both physical and virtual infrastructure is Lanamark’s ultimate goal. He said the new terminal server pack will allow companies to “go beyond analyzing server utilization and look at the users accessing the terminal servers.”
In addition to the terminal server upgrade, Angelo said the Lanamark Suite can analyze, report and manage workloads on both physical and virtual machines.
For example, the offering will collect and report data on the age, warranty, total power consumption, total cost, and the allocated and remaining memory of your physical and virtual machines. It can also help determine the necessary hardware and licencing requirements needed for a virtualization migration.
“You can pull out a calculator and try to do this on your own, but the challenge is you’re not using the data from the environment for sizing or ‘what if’ scenarios,” Angelo said. “There’s also the risk you’ll over spend and get too much infrastructure or you’ll under spend and get too little.”
Angelo added that the company’s flagship data centre optimization suite will be especially attractive to enterprises without a huge amount of in-house virtualization expertise.
Besides the on-site “data collector,” the system is entirely run and managed off-site by system integrators. IT managers can view reports and collaborate with their channel partners, but the intent of the system is to free up time for IT.
“Solution providers have engineers that can augment the capabilities that IT managers have and do this very quickly,” Angelo said. “Just work with your partners, get the simple data collector in your environment and don’t worry about doing the analysis.”
The news comes just days after CA Inc. announced its intention to buy capacity management firm Hyperformix. The company — which makes tools for managing physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructures — targets organizations that have virtualized roughly 20 to 30 per cent of their servers.
“At these preliminary stages, fundamental disciplines like capacity management are critically important. While we have been able to provide some capacity planning capabilities, particularly with our Service Assurance solutions, Hyperformix will give our customers sophisticated real-time and predictive capacity management capabilities,” said Andi Mann, CA’s vice president of virtualization product marketing, in a blog post. “This will help our customers to extend their virtualization by leaps and bounds, especially if they are still in the early- to mid-stages of their deployments.”
The Hyperformix deal is expected to close before the end of the year.
