Storage management company NetApp has bought data centre analytics specialist Akorri in an attempt to improve customers' ability to identify capacity bottlenecks and plan for capacity.Massachusetts-based Akorri, which doubled its customer base in 2010, has been deployed particularly within virtualisation environments where the product has been used to reduce costs involved in deploying virtualisation technology. Its BalancePoint product provides automated, infrastructure-wide visibility and analysis to help enterprises fix problems, optimise utilisation, and improve performance for both virtual and physical servers and storageFollowing the all-cash acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, the Akorri software will provide NetApp OnCommand with performance capacity analytics that will allow users greater visibility across the entire IT stack.

Manish Goel, executive vice president for product operations at NetApp said "The ability to accurately predict and manage performance and capacity requirements has been a common obstacle for many customers wanting to transition to a virtualised environment. Akorri further strengthens NetApp's data management capabilities to achieve greater quality of service and performance in their virtual and cloud environments"