ACADEMIA

LEGATO Systems, Inc., silver sponsor of this week's Microsoft TechEd 2003 event in Dallas, announced the immediate availability of LEGATO AppPanel(TM), a resource management product line that features end-to-end performance monitoring, pre-configured performance thresholds and alerting capabilities designed to ensure the maximum productivity levels of applications running on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Server and Windows NT environments. "We selected AppPanel to ensure Windows systems performance across our five service locations in Sweden," said Lars-Erik Behrns, CIO, MM Medical, Sweden. "AppPanel delivered health-check monitoring of performance levels, intelligent alerting, and drill-down information on where the problems were that saved us time in fixing problems. With AppPanel, we were able to optimize our Windows infrastructure for improved productivity and increased Quality of Service to our hospital customers." AppPanel reduces the cost and time of deployment of resource management technology yet increases the out-of-box benefits. It combines a light-weight design, which auto-deploys across a Windows environment with built-in expertise for which parameters are critical to an individual application's performance. AppPanel also ensures that application services keep running by restarting them if they go offline for too long of a period. "Microsoft is pleased that LEGATO continues to offer high quality performance and availability solutions such as AppPanel for the full range of Microsoft products. Managing the performance of Windows environments including Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 servers helps to prepare customers to ensure 24x7 optimum performance of our upcoming Exchange 2003," said Bob Ellsworth, director, Windows Server Product Management Group, Microsoft Corp. "AppPanel features such as its MMC snap-in console and integration to Microsoft Operations Manager are designed to lower the customer's total cost of ownership and improve supportability of the Windows environment by both Microsoft and LEGATO." "AppPanel appears to be a good fit for the mid-size Windows environment," stated Steve Kenniston, Technology Analyst for the Enterprise Storage Group. "One end-user that I spoke with described how AppPanel was very easy to deploy and found packet problems slowing down his network, almost immediately. AppPanel made sense for him, as well as other SME shops because companies of this size, typically, have not applied their framework solution to the mid-range Windows systems that he was managing." Using industry-standard interfaces, AppPanel gains maximum advantage from data published by applications and resources including SNMP, WMI, and Microsoft interfaces. AppPanel has a snap-in feature to Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), to enable rapid adoption by Windows administrators. LEGATO is offering an initial set of AppPanel modules to ensure performance of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server 2000, IIS, file & print and LEGATO RepliStor. Traditional resource management products have been criticized for overwhelming administrators with too many reports and messages that are time-consuming to sort through and decipher causing delays in the administrator's ability to take corrective action. AppPanel avoids these deficiencies by providing health-check alerts that signal administrators when performance is threatened, providing the exact information needed to address the issue and allowing administrators to drill-down for end-to-end monitoring data as required. The alerts feature also works with LEGATO Co-StandbyServer Advanced enabling it to receive performance alerts in order to automate corrective remediation.