Yesterday, with a single step, a new startup called 5nine entered two crowded and market segments: the P2V migration and the capacity planning ones.
P2V migration tools have been progressively included into every major virtualization platform: VMware, Microsoft and Citrix for sure have their own, and Oracle has three R&D departments now to produce a cool one as well.
The fact that all of the are available for free negatively impacted the business of the other vendors in this segment, which are struggling to survive.
So far none of the competitors in this space had the farsightedness to merge the migration tools with a capacity planning platform, so to accelerate the virtualization adoption and justify the existence of stand-alone P2V tools.
5nine seems to have exactly this strategy.
The US startup was probably founded earlier this year and seems privately funded.
It doesn’t expose much about its management team right now. The only two executives we know about are Dr. Konstantin Malkov, CTO, and Ratmir Timashev, Director.
Malkov comes from PWI Corporation, a consulting firm where he was the owner and CTO.
Timashev is the well known President of Veeam, so it’s easy to guess that in the future 5nine and Veeam will do business together.
The first product released by this startup is called P2V Hyper-V Planner.
As other capacity planning tools, it builds and maintains an inventory of the physical machines in the data center, tracking the usage of the application workloads and calculating different migration plans depending on business constrains and what-if scenarios.
5nine offers a free version of this product which seems only able to perform P2V migrations and provide basic reports.
The competition in the capacity planning space is remarkable, with VMware, Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBA, Lanamark and recently Liquidware Labs/VMsight.
On top of that it’s worth to highlight that Microsoft already offers a capacity planning tool for Hyper-V called MAP which is completely free.
5nine is now included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.