About a quarter of Redwood City, Calif.-based Nimsoft's customers are MSPs (managed services providers) who use Nimsoft's service-level monitoring software to help manage and monitor clients' software. The rest are enterprises who use the technology to monitor their own infrastructure.

"Because of our movement into serving larger enterprise and larger MSPs we've had to reengineer our Nimbus server," said Ken Vanderweel, director of product marketing. "Now the database can handle a tenfold increase in database inserts, which translates into higher volume devices under management. We've also improved scalability through our tiered architecture."

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The new release is designed to support real-time measurement of high-volume, high-transaction IT infrastructures, company officials said.

The new scalability came as welcome news to MSPs that rely on the platform to serve their end customers.

"If we stop saving data to our database for an hour it takes time to catch up, and in that time we are displaying data that is an hour old," said Keith Krupke, lead monitoring and management engineer at Berbee, a services-oriented solution provider and MSP that is now part of CDW. That lag time was not acceptable to Berbee and its customers.

"Now that is much faster than before because of the improved scalability." Krupke said.

The scalability improvement was so important to Berbee and its customers—many of them retailers preparing for the frenzied holiday shopping season—that the company participated in the beta program for the upgraded technology so that it could deploy the more scalable version sooner, Krupke said.

In addition, Nimbus now provides monitoring and management support for the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl) stack and offers customers the ability to centrally manage and monitor the Web and J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application servers: JBoss, IBM WebSphere Application Server, Sybase EAServer and BEA WebLogic.