News
Ovum releases new Technology Audit of Neptuny Caplan 3.2, confirming Caplan as "the future of Capacity Planning"
February 2010 by Marc Jacob
In updating its latest Technology Audit of recently released Neptuny Caplan™ 3.2, Ovum confirms its conclusion that Caplan™ is the “the future in capacity-planning solutions”[1] and is “impressed with its ease of use combined with its depth of capability.”
Virtualization-ready Caplan™ simplifies and optimizes consolidation and virtualisation planning.
Caplan™ 3.2 supports all major virtualization technologies from leading vendors such as VMware, AIX, HP, Sun, Citrix and Microsoft. Ovum is “particularly impressed” by Caplan™ Optimal Allocation Models that enable organisations to optimise the placement of virtual and physical machines on virtualised infrastructures. In particular, Caplan™ Optimal Allocation Models automatically simulate placement scenarios and suggest the optimal overall configuration based on customizable business or technical constraints, such as the number of physical machines, maximum utilization thresholds or set procurement budgets.
Caplan™ supports complex accounting, chargeback and cost models
Ovum considers the introduction of Caplan™ Accounting & Chargeback a product strength, which supports IT Financial Management in implementing accounting and chargeback tasks based on complex cost models. Caplan™ leverages resource utilization data to support users to fully account for IT service costs and to charge them back to final users. Caplan™ supports several types of cost models and its interface allows users to easily create multiple target hierarchies and to assign resources to targets.
Caplan™ correlates business KPI’s with infrastructure KPI’s
The ability to correlate business and infrastructure KPI’s is crucial in aligning infrastructure optimization processes with actual and forecasted business needs. For example, Caplan™ can automate the correlation of business KPIs, such as the number of invoices per day and the expected web traffic following a promotional campaign, and link these to IT infrastructure-related KPIs such as CPU utilisation and network performance. Ovum believes that “capacity management from a business perspective will become an essential capability” and is impressed by Caplan’s™ ability to “provide organisations with the maturity to establish capacity planning based on business metrics”.
Moreover, Caplan™ isaligned to ITIL® (including v2 and v3) capacity-management guidelines: this feature is crucial nowadays since organizations are moving towards an advanced and business-oriented approach to capacity management which will require them to review their organizations IT infrastructure and align to ITIL best practices.
Caplan™ agent-less connectors now aggregate data from over 50 management tools
Ovum analysts are “impressed with the solution’s analytical capability, which includes ‘what-if analyses’ and the wide range of management tools that Caplan™ can gather data from”. With version 3.2, Caplan™ has introduced new and improved connectors to import performance and configuration data from management tools, native platforms and interfaces, such as: Oracle Enterprise Manager (improved), Ganglia (new), NetIQ AppManager (new), HP uCMDB (new), EMC2 Storage Scope Control Center (improved) and VMware (improved with vSphere 4 support). Moreover, Caplan™ 3.2 provides a new Integrated Development Environment based on Eclipse and named Caplan™ Integration Studio (CIS) which helps customers to create custom connectors.
In its conclusions, Ovum continues to express its belief that Caplan™
“represents the future in capacity-planning solutions.” Neptuny’s commitment and focus on enhancing the solution’s capability put the company in the position to continue to deliver on its stated goal to enable advanced, scalable and comprehensive enterprise capacity management.
Giuseppe Nardiello, Neptuny’s Business Development Manager, commented the new Technology Audit, saying: “We are very pleased that an influential analyst such as Ovum has confirmed Caplan as the ’future of Capacity Planning’. The feedback we are receiving from the market is that Caplan is the only viable solution to easily implement a continuous and automated Capacity Management process also for large IT infrastructures. As confirmed by this updated OVUM report, our new version of the product, Caplan 3.2, now enables customers to fully address their critical needs related to Virtualization Planning and Accounting & Chargeback".
