Can you briefly tell us how the company started and share a little about your current executive team?

Founded in 2007 by Alex Bakman, VKernel has quickly established itself as the leading provider of Capacity Management products for VMware and Microsoft virtualized infrastructures. Backed by top tier venture capitalists, we are lead by an experienced management team with significant experience in systems management, storage, networking, and virtualization domains.

VKernel just announced StorageVIEW 1.0. What can you tell us about this new tool?

StorageVIEW is the latest desktop assessment tool from VKernel that quickly and easily identifies the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest storage I/O latency in a VMware environment. StorageVIEW 1.0 supports SAN, iSCSI and NFS shared storage environments. StorageVIEW 1.0 joins other free assessment tools CapacityVIEW and AppVIEW to create a family of easy to download, easy to install, desktop tools that VM administrators can use for quick diagnostic views into their virtualized infrastructure.

What are the benefits?

StorageVIEW helps VM admins quickly and easily determine if high latency data paths are causing problems in their virtualized environments. StorageVIEW is a free to use, simple to download, 6 MB desktop tool that provides near instant visibility into the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest latency including:

• Listing of the associated VMs for these high latency paths
• Throughput information for each VM in the high latency path
• Aggregated results for the remaining datastore/host pairs
• Support for NFS, ISCSI, Fibre Channel

Why create a new tool?

Customer demand for simple to use, easy to download assessment tool that targets the problems vm admins have with storage.

Where can our readers go to download?

http://www.vkernel.com/products/storage-view

Looking at VKernel as a whole, how would you say the company and technologies are positioned relative to the competition?

There are a lot of good companies making products to help VM administrators with their virtual environments. We are exclusively focused on solving the problems associated with capacity management. Our focus provides a significant competitive advantage.

What market segments are you targeting?

We have customers with several thousand VMs down to customers with just 40. What we have found is that once you go above 50 or so VMs, it becomes very, very challenging to do capacity management on spreadsheets, whiteboards, or using real time monitoring tools.

So where does VKernel go from here?

The problems of capacity management are only growing, as more and more applications are virtualized. From discussions with our customers, there is a significant amount of innovation to be done to solve this problem and keep up with emerging areas such as cloud and VDI. From the business side, we will continue to expand our sales distribution, partner network, and size of the development organization. We are very excited about our prospects and our ability to meet customer demand for scalable capacity management solutions.

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Related Links:  www.vkernel.com, StorageVIEW download: http://www.vkernel.com/products/storage-view

Bryan Semple is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel