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FORTISPHERE UNVEILS VIRTUAL MACHINE MANAGEMENT SUITE TO ENABLE ‘SMART’ VIRTUALIZATION GROWTH

Fortisphere Virtual Essentials™ Provides Organizations with Control, Visibility and Policy-Enforced Best Practices

Chantilly, Va.—January 14, 2007—Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced the general availability of Fortisphere Virtual Essentials™, a virtual machine (VM) lifecycle management solution suite. Providing organizations with cradle-to-grave identification, tracking, reporting and management of online and offline virtual machines, Virtual Essentials delivers unprecedented visibility and control throughout enterprise virtual infrastructures. This new solution is based on Fortisphere’s pioneering Smart Growth™ approach to rapidly expanding virtual infrastructures through greater visibility, granular control, and policy-enforced best practices.

“The continued growth in the enterprise adoption of virtualization technologies is surfacing operational challenges in many areas, but chief among the concerns identified by our research is managing virtual machine sprawl,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “This, along with the need for improved virtual machine visibility will increasingly motivate IT organizations to begin to look for tools that can reduce virtualization management complexity (and potential exposure) while maximizing virtualization administrator efficiency.”

Leveraging Fortisphere’s InsideTrack™ Technology, the Virtual Essentials product suite delivers IT staff real-time purview, correlative analysis and policy-based control of all virtual machine configuration, network communications, services, state, and system resources.

The Fortisphere Virtual Essentials suite is comprised of two products —Fortisphere Virtual Insight™ and Fortisphere Virtual Foresight™. Both solutions provide multi-platform support for VMware, Citrix XenSource and Microsoft, working across desktops, workstations and servers.

Fortisphere Virtual Insight™

Fortisphere Virtual Insight is an operational lifecycle management product that enables enterprises to inspect, tag, track and report on all VMs as they move throughout preproduction and production environments. Fortisphere Virtual Insight offers organizations a number of new features for securely managing their virtual infrastructure, including:

  • Configuration Introspection—Provides full purview into every VM, including applications, patches, hotfixes, and network configuration.
  • Virtual Machine Tagging—Enables users to embed a “virtual machine fingerprint” into every VM with a complete list of business attributes such as owner, functional group, and trust level.
  • Virtual Lineage™—Provides a visual lineage of each VM, including all parent, sibling and child relationships. .
  • Reporting—Generates more than 50 out-of-the box reports on the status of the virtual infrastructure.
  • Audit Trail—Records all system actions with a detailed history of changes and transactions, including integration support for log management applications.

Fortisphere Virtual Foresight™

Fortisphere Virtual Foresight is a policy lifecycle management product that provides out-of-the-box best practices designed to manage and enforce VM policies. With Fortisphere Virtual Foresight, organizations have access to a number of features, including:

  • Migratory Policy Enforcement—Embedded policy management ensures enforcement travels with the VM throughout the lifecycle, regardless of origin, organization, location, owner or state.
  • Centralized Policy Store—Provides organizations with a central repository of operations, security, network, performance and management best practices.
  • Policy Inheritance—Ensures parent policies are automatically applied to clones and copies.
  • Manual and Automated Response—With built-in and extensible best practice policies, users can define a wide range of responses, from informational notifications to automated actions.
  • Correlative Policy Engine—Provides correlative analysis of virtual machine and hypervisor data to evaluate risks and compliance violations in a business relevant context. The powerful engine leverages real-time application, configuration, and network information for policy application, evaluation and enforcement.

“As organizations move from deploying fixed physical assets to virtual machines, IT personnel need managerial control and real-time visibility into virtual infrastructures,” said Michael Harper, president and CEO, Fortisphere. “Fortisphere Virtual Essentials is the first VM lifecycle management solution to offer the combined benefits of real-time control and visibility from within the actual virtual machine regardless of where it resides. As a result, organizations can now confidently accelerate VM growth, realizing the benefits of reduced computing costs and more efficient utilization of their physical IT infrastructure.”

For a complete list of features and benefits for both Fortisphere Virtual Insight and Fortisphere Virtual Foresight, please visit http://www.fortisphere.com/products.

About Fortisphere

Fortisphere is a provider of Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management software that ensures virtualized IT infrastructure environments operate efficiently, effectively and securely. Founded in October 2006, Fortisphere is pioneering the concept of Smart Growth, a way to facilitate rapid expansion of virtual infrastructures through greater visibility, granular control and best practices. Fortisphere is a venture-backed company headquartered in the greater Washington, DC area, with offices in Boston, MA, Glenwood, MD, Chantilly, VA. More information about Fortisphere is located online at www.fortisphere.com.

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