Real-Status builds a bird’s eye view of a cloud

Behind the nebulous idea of a cloud are thousands of servers, switches, appliances both physical and virtual and any number of complicating bits of machinery and software all just waiting to cause a problem. Managing massive infrastructure isn’t a fun job, especially if some of that infrastructure is virtual, which is why Real-Status, one of the Structure 2011 LaunchPad companies, decided to improve the view into the troposphere (or just the cloud).

The company, which was spun out of consulting and services firm Intergence Interactive in March of this year, has raised £1.2 million ($1.9 million USD) from angels and WH Ireland to develop its software. HyperGlance is a data visualization that maps out a company’s infrastructure in 3-D and tries to indicate the health of that infrastructure in a visual format easily viewed on a single monitor. The thesis behind the company is that data can be meaningless unless it’s presented correctly, so it aims to show some of the reams of IT information in a way that can promote insights and understanding in a flash and among lay people who don’t understand command lines or who think hot swappable is a new clothing line for tweens.

Real-Status is based in Cambridge, England, and its CTO Stace Hipperson was the first to consider using visualisation and navigation techniques from the computer games industry to build the visualizations it offers today.