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Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:

UXComm Announces AutonomIQ For Utility Management

UXComm announced the general availability of its flagship product suite, AutonomIQ for Utility Management. In concert with the product launch is the announcement of UXComm's Series A financing and the expansion of its executive management team with the addition of Mark Sigal as the company's chief executive officer. The AutonomIQ software suite provides businesses and infrastructure vendors with a cohesive family of management software products that addresses the unique management requirements of modular, utility computing environments.

A convergence of forces in business, including emerging business-on-demand initiatives, continued pressures to reduce costs, the ubiquity of standards- based Wintel and Lintel server platforms, and an increase in mainstream Web- based applications are giving rise to a new modular, service-oriented utility compute model. These new compute environments, made up of large numbers of ever-changing, diverse compute components, offer the promise of affordably delivering capacity-on-demand and the ability to continually align information technologies with business priorities. While the benefits of modular computing seem apparent, new and unforeseen management costs and complexities have surfaced that are driving the need for a new way to manage these dynamic modular environments.

"What's not to like? Customers consistently tell us flexible sourcing of commodity computing components, when coupled with 'plug and play' infrastructure deployments, is a strategic game-changer. It promises to reduce IT asset costs and improve availability and service delivery," said Mark Sigal, UXComm CEO. "While the benefits of modular computing to both infrastructure vendors and businesses seem obvious, customers tell us that without a fresh new approach to management, these very granular, dynamic environments quickly become unmanageable with legacy systems management tools and processes. UXComm understands the management requirements of these new environments from both the top-down and bottom-up perspective and is committed to delivering management solutions that meet the real-world requirements of customers."

A New Way To Manage Today'S Modular, Compute World

The AutonomIQ family of products addresses the needs of modular, utility computing and delivers the industry's first cohesive suite of utility management software solutions that feature:

• Localized, policy-based autonomic server management that provides applications with a logical interface for managing the underlying server and system resources.

• Functionality that spans from "bare metal" to infrastructure to provide granular visibility, correlation and control.

• Lifecycle management of one or many server instances, from deployment and provisioning to upgrades and ongoing systems management, all of which is coordinated by a lightweight internal policy engine.

• Open interoperability through form-factor and operating systems agnosticism, legacy systems management, application interoperability, and support of new and emerging standards, including Web services, IPMI, HPI, WMI, SNMP, CIM/XML, SBLIM and JDBC.

Powered by UXComm's Intelligent Agent Architecture (IA2), the AuotnomIQ application suite exposes localized autonomic functions to any level within a server deployment. IA2 features small footprint, policy-driven agents that have the ability to reside anywhere within a modular datacenter topology from the blade to the chassis. The IA2 agents gather information from the elements to the aggregate infrastructure, and operate in isolation, hierarchically, or on a peer-to-peer basis. These agents are also adaptive in that they can use events to trigger dynamic policy generation. The IA2 agents assume many different roles and perform a variety of tasks, including protocol mediation, discovery, provisioning, intelligent filtering and resource virtualization-all fundamental ingredients for enabling autonomic management.

The AutonomIQ product suite is designed to provide an evolutionary path that scales from existing compute environments and management processes to fully virtualized utility computing. The suite includes: Distributed Element Management, Dynamic Server Provisioning Service Management, Server Virtualization, and an intuitive visual development environment for creating highly tailored workflow models. AutonomIQ for Distributed Element Management is currently available, with AutonomIQ for Dynamic Server Provisioning expected to be available by year-end, followed by the balance of the AutonomIQ offerings.