FireScope announced the general availability of FireScope Unify 4.3. In addition to strong NetApp integration at the API level, the release includes multiple features designed to promote greater visibility and agility in IT Operations.

New features include:

* Introduction of HTML5 Canvas mind maps for FireScope Unify’s Service Explorer, Network Topology and Virtual Environment Maps, enabling faster drill down among infrastructure dependencies to identify the root cause of performance and availability issues.

* Integration with NetApp’s Manageability 4.0 SDK, providing direct API-level access to NetApp Filers, Data Fabric Manager (now called Operations Manager) and ONTAP agents.

* Expansion of the built-in Discovery engine to include further API-support from VMWare, NetApp and others to expand capabilities for automatically detecting and configuring best-practice monitoring without human effort.

* Addition of a Performance Scorecard dashboard for FireScope Unify appliances, helping administrators fine-tune their configuration to achieve maximum performance.

* Support for NetApp ONTAP 7, ONTAP 7 C-Mode, ONTAP 8 and ONTAP 8 C-Mode connecting either directly to NetApp filers, Data Fabric Manager (now called Operations Manager) and ONTAP agents.

The introduction of NetApp API integration in FireScope Unify - which joins existing support for storage devices from EMC, Hitachi, Dell and others - comes as strong enterprise demand is propelling rapid growth in the storage virtualization market. Yet, as greater percentages of IT budgets are spent on storage, many organizations are struggling to link these investments with forecasted and realized business outcomes.

While previous versions of FireScope Unify have been capable of delivering end-to-end service views in as little as three days, version 4.3 has gone further to slash the time and effort involved. By integrating API access with its built-in discovery, FireScope Unify has the ability to automatically connect to VMWare, NetApp and other API frameworks, inventory current configuration and automatically apply a best-practice collection of monitoring metrics, dashboards, events and alerts. Subsequent to initial deployment, as discovery is performed on a scheduled basis, FireScope Unify automatically adjusts its configuration as new or modified virtual machines, volumes and applications are identified. This enables the solution to keep up with today’s highly dynamic, virtualized data center in a way that no other solution on the market can match.

“Considerable attention is paid on the speed of deployment of enterprise management solutions,” said Mark Lynd, President and COO of FireScope Inc. “What is often ignored is how well the solution can keep up with a rapidly evolving infrastructure in the months and years after initial deployment. In that time, additional virtual machines and storage volumes are brought online and existing resources are scaled based on business requirements. Often, more effort is required to adjust the configuration of management tools than was required to deploy the new resources. With FireScope Unify, organizations finally have a solution that can adapt on the fly, without human intervention, to a rapidly changing infrastructure.”

Existing customers with active maintenance and support agreements are encouraged to update their FireScope Unify deployments through the automated update system at their earliest convenience.