Server Management Startup Helps Predict Future Failures
Coolan is a startup headed by former Facebook Open Compute Founder Amir Michael. Coolan allows IT experts to get a broad spectrum view of where their systems lies in terms of several key benchmarks. Coolan’s functionality is derived from a client that is installed on servers within your infrastructure.
Data about your infrastructure is securely sent to Coolan’s cloud where the data is processed, mined and compared against other companies. Knowing more about the limitations of your infrastructure helps organizations make smarter decisions in regards to their future hardware purchases.
Coolan’s customers will be able to login to a dashboard to see how their infrastructure stacks up against others within the industry. The dashboard also gives detailed analysis on your systems such as their age, their error rates and information about the firmware. Coolan then takes all of the data that it has procured and curates it with machine learning techniques.
Coolan’s cloud uses this data to predict future errors based on patterns found in different analytic sets provided by those who have installed the client. The idea is to predict problems before they occur. If two different companies are in the same category, it’s possible that they use much of the same infrastructure and experience much of the same problems. Coolan takes these data sets and presents it administrators on the dashboard alerting IT staff that a much larger issue may be on the horizon.
Wouldn’t some companies rather keep information about their infrastructure private? Founder Amir Michael doesn’t think so. “We’re riding on the tails of Open Compute,” says Michael. “People are starting to feel more comfortable about sharing information about their infrastructure,” Michael remarks.
Michael stresses that all information is collected via HTTPS secure connection. He also mentions that information about specific datacenters and companies is not represented. The dashboard allows customers to have complete control of the information that they decide to share with the Coolan’s cloud. According to a blog post on Coolan’s website, their product is currently available for beta testing.
