Virtual Instruments, whose software and hardware is used to manage data center performance, plans to release the next edition of its VirtualWisdom software in the fourth quarter.
CEO John Thompson says the next release will go beyond the company's support for Fibre Channel SANs and VMware hypervisor environments. It will include full-blown Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support as well as support for AIX LPAR (local partition).
[ALSO: 6 things you might not know about Virtual Instruments]
As for FCoE, Thompson says his company almost only sees it today being deployed on top-of-rack switches. "I've only talked to one customer over the last three years who even intimated that they were going to go beyond top-of-rack, and it's a telco that might be doing it more for marketing reasons," he says. But he says all the storage companies say they're going to have FCoE down to the array, so it's something Virtual Instruments needs to stay on top of.
On the hypervisor front, expect support over time for Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux offerings. Thompson is on Microsoft's board, but he says that won't influence how soon Virtual Instruments will support Hyper-V. "Our priority is solving problems for customers running mission critical applications and they don't run mission critical applications on any x86 hypervisor, even VMware," he says.
MORE ON VI: Virtual Instruments: Avoiding "The Abyss", trouncing Brocade
Virtual Instruments is looking to get its engineering team on a schedule of alternating updates, every six months, of its software and hardware offerings. So expect the company to announce its new VirtualWisdom software in September or October, and release it in December, and then issue new hardware in summer of 2014.
Virtual Instruments competes with systems management companies, such as CA and IBM, but also infrastructure companies like Brocade, which are adding more management features (such as Network Advisor) to their storage network devices.
Bob Brown tracks network research in his Alpha Doggs blog and Facebook page, as well on Twitter and Google +.
Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.