Intel has just launched a new suite of software for its Data Center Manager product family that offers fine-tuned server performance monitoring and management capabilities for environments built with OpenStack.

The somewhat clumsily named Intel Datacenter Manager: Service Assurance Administrator (SAA) platform bids to entice more services into Software-defined infrastructure times while reducing the time it takes to deploy them from weeks to potentially just a few minutes, reports ZDNet.

Intel’s Data Center Manager began life as a rather basic kludge of middleware that scooped up temperature and CPU power data for server energy management software. Since then its added a virtual KVM gateway, and now, it adds monitoring capabilities for hardware running OpenStack.

SAA is sold as a standalone product. It works by installing an agent inside each node of the OpenStack environment, reporting back on that node’s performance – reporting being expressed in the number of instructions per second that are processed. Other features include security and capacity management capabilities. The basic premise is that IT pros will be able to check if their OpenStack platforms are behaving as they should, while providing additional security assurances. That could help to reassure those who’re holding back on adopting OpenStack due to the security concerns that go hand-in-hand with open-source software.

ZDNet quoted Intel’s Shannon Poulin, vice president and general manager of its datacenter marketing team, as saying there’s lots of gaps in how ITs want to deploy datacenter technology.

“What we’re looking at right now is an industry in flux,” said Poulin, suggesting that the shift to the cloud is creating as many solutions as it is problems in the way datacenter tech is deployed.

Intel’s vision for software-defined infrastructure is similar to many others with regard to providing numerous orchestration, hardware, and application layers, Poulin admitted. However, the company intends to stand out by exposing the telemetry between these layers.

As such, Intel’s new SDI will cover everything from monitoring to reporting and remediation in real-time, ZDNet notes. With regards to OpenStack, it also assigns each app a designated performance SLA for targeted management using adjustments and hardware instrumentation.

Intel is offering SAA both directly and via other vendors, the same strategy its employed for other DCM products. It runs at a cost of $200 per server per year, and is available now. Check out the promotional video below for more information.

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