Harvest

Harvest is a web application to make your server estate more efficient, save costs and reduce unnecessary environmental impact.

It finds the most underutilised servers in your estate, tells you who owns them and what applications they run.

It persuades stakeholders to use their servers more wisely by giving them key information: how much heat they generate, how much power they take, how much they cost to run, even their original purchase price.

By using data in your existing enterprise monitoring system or from System Garden's Habitat, Harvest quantifies the entire compute power at the organisation's disposal, your current utilisation and various calculations of efficiency.

Benchmarks and Drill-Downs

Harvest gives senior IT management a benchmark against which they can measure their organisations. Your hardware investments can be compared with different companies in the same market place.

Harvest's knowledge of the organisational structure, applications, and location allows productivity questions to be asked of particular projects or groups within an enterprise. As a practical example, it can track and monitor the effectiveness of grid and other programmes of utility computing.

IT teams can use Harvest as a way of involving developers, project managers and application groups in the effort of increasing machine efficiency. By use of the performance portal, every machine is open to inspection, discussion and anlysis. Proactive reports by email keep everyone up to date with the current situation of the chosen machines and by combining data from different vendors and monitoring systems, this data is accessable from a single place. A community focus for performance issues.

Repository

The power of Harvest lies in its ability to analyse the whole organisation. The more servers monitored, the more effective the analysis. Any existing information gathering system can be used with data placed in Harvest's common repository to provide context and full analysis.

The open source Habitat was created and licensed with this in mind: it can run on every machine and incur no capital expenditure. Thus, even small machines may be monitored with modest outlay. Habitat even provides engineers with a fast, detailed visualisation of repository data with a 'fat client' graphical visualisation tool.

The data in the repository is yours -- you can download any part of it from the web or directly to a spreadsheet for your own numerical slicing and dicing.

Portal

Harvest is a web application. It can be run as a service across secure internet connections or be installed as a software appliance in your own data centre. The internet service minimises administration obligations, helping small and medium enterprises benefit from a system that may have only been enjoyed by the largest corporations.

All communication is secure and uses standard internet protocols (SSL and HTTP) to work with existing firewall and proxy infrastructure. This applies to data collection and browsing from your desktop. No sacrifices are made if you use it over the internet!

Use your servers more wisely, use Harvest