Next generation visualizations / Partnering with Intepoint

  by Kosten Metreweli | 22 Jul 2007 | Permalink | Everything Else

“Ok, I’ve seen it in the press … Tideway Foundation generates great application dependency data  … well, what can I use it for?”

The answer: the “what” is limited only by your imagination.

Working with partners

Today, Tideway dependency data is used by customers for a variety of purposes, including: intelligent incident routing, CMDB & metadata population, data center optimizations and migrations, etc. But Tideway also actively works with partners to develop new & innovative ways to use our dependency data.

One of the most recent examples is Intepoint. Intepoint is a specialist in helping IT managers in large data centers visualize different planning and disaster recovery scenarios. Intepoint’s key innovation is the ability to mash up several types of data into a 3-d visual diagram that the user can interrogate and drill into for different purposes.

Take for example this interesting visualisation of a data center:

Moving from the top down, we see a selected line of business linked to several core business processes (trading, risk calculation, etc.), then down to specific business applications and their enabling software components, and then down to three separate data centers, each with several selected server racks represented internally.

Value to the business

In this case, Intepoint’s value starts with transperancy: a specific line of business can drill down from core business processes, to the business applications that support those processes, to the actual physical data centers and racks needed to keep the business up and running on a daily basis. Importantly, this data isn’t managements view of ‘how we think it works’ — this is data generated directly from the run-time environment.

This transperancy then enables Intepoint to deliver other value sources: scenario planning for disaster recovery, consumption and cost mapping back to physical infrastructure via LOBs, processes, and applications, etc.

How it works

To achieve this visualisation, Intepoint combined several sources:

• Basic LOB and business process management descriptors
• Core inventory data on servers, software, and business applications
• Dependency data between those components (e.g. HW -> SW -> to business applications)
• Geo-spatial data about the location of those physical assets

For customers who have invested to achieve the highest level of service modelling and mapping with Tideway Foundation, Tideway can work with partners like Intepoint export the right relationship data through our Export 2.0 framework to enable these value-add reporting capabilities.