I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of a face to face meeting with Doug this week, He happened to be passing through the UK on the return leg of his travels to see amongst others , the development team in Moscow.

While vendor meetings are a reasonably frequent part of my worklife , they are not usually with the CEO , but its clear that then it comes to Vkernel they all share the same vision of flag ship product offering the best in class for Capacity Analysis.

After a brief bio.. (He’s only a recent addition to the Vkernel team , but as former CEO of Onaro and experience at Motive & Tivoli , he no stranger to the arena ) We talked about how Vkernel got where it is , and what the current offerings are, both free and licensed.

Then we got to the interesting stuff – where Vkernel is going. One of the things I’ve always fed back not only as a blogger but as an end user is a call for tighter integration between the product lines. In a world where de-duplication is very much a buzzword , there is plenty of scope within the product range for integration not only at the front end in terms of user interface , but at the back end datasets. The next release major release ( as yet unnamed ) from Vkernel will seek to address that and move all of the task under that single pane of glass in a single appliance with a single database. I know this has been in the pipeline for some time and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it. The other main feature Doug hinted towards was about getting data out of the products. While they have their own transports for pulling data out ( scheduled reports in  pdf or xml) there currently isn’t any way that this could be done programmatically – who knows what form this API could take but it any way of exposing the results of the analysis to the rest of the environment has got to be “a good thing”

Moving away from the technical to the strategic side we briefly touched on some of current news of VMware targeting its own partners and releasing a competing product in many sectors of the management eco system. Far from reducing revenue , Doug believes the reverse has occurred as awareness of the need for capacity management is raised people are more likely to “bake off” a number of products from all the main vendors and choose the one they like best. Looking to the future we spoke around the idea of more intelligent modelling using metrics derived from what a given environment can provide, to give an accurate benchmark of the typical VM. This has a high value at the Architecture stage of a project , where you can clearly see if your environment meets the requirements of the vendor , not only in CPU/ Ram count , but network and IO performance.

Watch this space for more news on upcoming releases from Vkernel.