Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up Peakstone Corp., a company specializing in capacity-on-demand technologies, took its products to the managed services market with the launch of three Peakstone eAssurance services in March.
Based on Peakstone’s capacity-on-demand technology geared towards re-routing Web site traffic to under-utilized servers, the eAssurance offering is available under three plans: Infrastructure Service Assurance, Business Service Assurance and Business Plan Assurance.
“Most people…buy more [servers] than they need for their site because they’re worried about either some servers may fail some days or…the site might get overwhelmed. So typically, if they need five servers, they buy 15 and run them at 30 per cent capacity throughout the year,” said Tom Buiocchi, vice-president of marketing at Peakstone.
In times of server stress, a company will boost its servers’ capacities to handle the extra traffic, he added. But in times of reduced spending on infrastructure, companies find themselves being forced to make due with the servers they currently have.
Peakstone’s technology detects when a server is reaching its upper capacity and then goes out to find a server that is being under-utilized, Buiocchi said. Traffic is then re-routed to the under-utilized server until the other server’s traffic returns to normal. Under the eAssurance services, Peakstone is now offering this technology to service providers so they can sell it as a managed service to their customers.
Each of the three flavours of eAssurance focuses on a different corporate server need. The Infrastructure Service Assurance provides customers with a real-time portal that shows the traffic, the service quality, the performance and the capacity utilization of their site. Buiocchi claims competitor products can offer any one of those elements, but not all together in real time.
“It’s kind of a step up from a monitoring tool that’s quite reactive in nature,” Buiocchi said.
The Business Service Assurance allows customers to set parameters for a site so that on a server level, it behaves the way they want it to behave, Buiocchi said. It offers all of the same real-time reports available in the Infrastructure Service Assurance, but also enforces site behaviour through configured objectives.
“And that report really links the IT professional with the needs of the business,” Buiocchi said.
The Business Plan Assurance is aimed at customers who want to calculate how much capacity will be needed for an application they are planning on rolling out on their site in a few months’ time, Buiocchi said. The service also helps customers determine how to grow the capacity over time and deploy the application most efficiently with the lowest up-front capacity cost. The Business Plan Assurance helps a customer from the pre-deployment stage all the way to the operations stage.
According to Amy Levy, an industry analyst with Summit Strategies Inc. of Boston, Mass., the market for products and services like those offered by Peakstone is still early in its development, and most companies are niche players focusing on areas like capacity-on-demand or load-balancing.
“I think Peakstone’s value proposition is pretty unique,” Levy said. From an ASP’s perspective, she said it benefits the ASP by allowing them to analyze traffic and adjust service models to better meet customers’ needs.
The Peakstone eAssurance services are available now, with pricing beginning at US$4,200 per month and scaling according to the size of a customer’s capacity. Peakstone can be found on the Web at
www.peakstone.com
.
