Symantec i3 7.5 delivers proactive application performance management solution to drive down IT costs

Symantec has announced the release of its i3 7.5 application performance management software, formerly known as VERITAS i3. The latest version of the software provides significant enhancements to enable performance problem identification, root cause analysis and proactive management of J2EE platforms.

Additionally, it extends support to the Sybase database environment and provides customers with additional operating system and database support. As enterprises increasingly invest in business critical online applications, Symantec i3 software provides IT managers with a comprehensive set of end-to-end performance management tools that will allow them to proactively monitor, analyse and fine-tune applications to attain increased application transaction performance and high availability service levels.

Using Symantec i3, customers whose production environments require optimum performance levels to support high-value operations such as online banking, stock trading or retail transactions are able to achieve measurable application performance, as well as productivity and availability improvements that directly translate into tangible bottom line savings.

"Maintaining optimal performance of enterprise applications has become a business-critical initiative for today's enterprises," said Brian Babineau, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Comprehensive application performance management solutions, like Symantec i3 7.5, help organisations improve business efficiency and mitigate costs by quickly identifying and resolving potential bottlenecks within an application infrastructure."

"The business impact of poor performing applications has turned into a mainstream problem for enterprises, as they increasingly rely on them to drive productivity and revenue. This is of vital importance in South Africa, where local businesses are becoming increasingly competitive within the global arena," says Patrick Evans, regional director, Symantec Africa. "With the increasing demand for high application performance, Symantec is offering advanced management, monitoring and tuning features with the release of Symantec i3 7.5 to help ensure that mission-critical applications perform with the fewest interruptions and with high availability."

J2EE applications require advanced monitoring, analysis and reporting capabilities to ensure performance and availability. The latest version of Symantec i3 for J2EE builds on the strong Symantec i3 foundation to provide the following additional capabilities:

* Extensive new portal server management for IBM WebSphere Portal Server and BEA WebLogic Portal Server; showing portlet performance over time by invocation and end-user response time, to identify performance issues quickly and reduce cost.
* A new customisable dashboard to control viewing rights for J2EE performance. This new interface provides selectable user-named views of J2EE performance data, to show only information relevant to a specific business role and keep it there for easy viewing when customers log out and back in.
* New flexible, user defined J2EE instrumentation modes and memory leak detection to give customers the information they need to troubleshoot J2EE performance issues quickly and easily and at the same time protect against CPU overhead surges.

Application transaction behaviours change constantly in production environments. The unique Adaptive Instrumentation capability included in Symantec i3 for J2EE software ensures all of an application's 'hot spots' are identified and instrumented automatically - without costly application server restarts.

One of the challenges that IT managers have faced to date in the Sybase database environment has been the absence of production tools that enable them to fine-tune availability and performance levels. With the introduction of Symantec Indepth for Sybase, IT managers will now have the ability to ensure mission-critical applications perform at peak efficiency. Symantec Indepth for Sybase provides database performance linked to applications by capturing, measuring and correlating performance metrics from critical system components. In addition, Symantec Indepth for Sybase helps to detect and correct the root cause of performance degradation before the end-user is affected, maximising the return on technology investment.

Symantec i3 7.5 extends new support for operating systems (OS) and databases, offering users the ability to obtain all of the benefits of Symantec i3 regardless of which OS or database they choose. New OS support includes:

* Sun Solaris 10
* IBM AIX 5.3

New J2EE server support includes:

* IBM WebSphere 6.0
* BEA WebLogic 9.0
* Apache Tomcat 5.5

New database and packaged application support includes:

* PeopleSoft 8.4.4
* PeopleSoft 8.4.5
* Sybase 12.5.3
* Oracle 10.1.0.4
* Oracle 9.2.0.7

Symantec's team of highly skilled application performance management consulting professionals and service partners prepare customer environments to ensure the successful deployment of Symantec i3 software. Symantec consulting, education and support services help ensure the ongoing stability and scalability of business applications and vastly improve their performance through formal application performance assessments, process optimisation, product deployment services and application performance tuning. These services allow customers to deploy a holistic performance and availability management platform that proactively identifies and avoids future problems and reduces expenditures.