May 29th, 2012
Len Rosenthal
We just returned from EMC World 2012 — a phenomenal event for the company in terms of the number of people we met with, and the depth of discussions. Virtual Instruments has attended this show for the last four years and it’s great to see the progress we’ve made in terms of who already knows about us. It’s also very gratifying to note the number of people who were referred to us by their IT management peers and other vendors … HDS, EMC, IBM, and many resellers. I guess we can’t claim to be a “best-kept secret” any longer!
As for other trends … the fibre channel market is more alive than ever before. Of course, our current customers all have FC SANs, but of the people who had not already heard about us, it seemed that about 80% of them rely on FC for their business-critical apps. There were surprisingly very few NAS shops, even fewer iSCSI shops, and FCoE interest was mild at best. A few Cisco shops were heading in this direction over the “next few years,” but we didn’t find anyone heading down an end-to-end FCoE path.
At the booth, we focused on “Ensuring Performance and Availability of your Private Cloud.” Lots of people are interested in building private clouds, but it seemed that for the most part, not many are actually running a productive private cloud yet. This just re-enforces the need for products like VirtualWisdom that can eliminate the risk of moving critical apps to a private cloud. Just about everyone we had extended meetings spoke at length with are doing some form of consolidation, refresh, or migration project. Also, a surprisingly large number of them are building new data centers in the next 12-18 months to accommodate their growth. Helping people optimize their infrastructure, consolidate, upgrade and migrate to new platforms are some of our biggest strengths, and the discussions at EMC World underscored the need for this level of support. Changes to infrastructure always carry some risk, but with VirtualWisdom, we can help them de-risk these infrastructure transformations.
If you’re planning a consolidation/migration/refresh, call your local Virtual Instruments team to talk through the project, or download this best practice whitepaper on consolidation: http://www.virtualinstruments.com/files/pdfs/WP_Storage-Consolidation-Best-Practices.pdf, or check out this on-demand webcast on migration best practices: http://info.virtualinstruments.com/webinar-cloud-migration.html
January 23rd, 2012
Len Rosenthal
You might notice the new VI company tagline … Performance, Availability, Guaranteed. For those of you long time customers, you might remember our original tag … Instrument, Measure, Analyze, Optimize. As our company has evolved, so has our customer base, therefore we were looking for a tagline that reflects these changes and the benefits that companies receive from our infrastructure optimization platform.
As many of you know, our roots come from Finisar, which excelled in selling to engineers. Engineers like to know how things work, and our original tagline described the steps in how VirtualWisdom (then NetWisdom) gets used. Well, it’s still true, you have to instrument your infrastructure before you can measure, analyze and optimize it. But today, we more often are talking to the IT people who simply want to know what we’ll do for them …the benefits from using VirtualWisdom.
Virtual Instruments is unique in that we offer the most complete, most granular, most accurate, and most useful solution for helping IT to prevent and fix performance and availability problems in the IT infrastructure. Using VirtualWisdom, customers can guarantee the service their applications get from their SAN infrastructure. Today, no one else can offer real-time measurement and monitoring capabilities that enable that level of guarantee. So, to find out how we can do this, you’ll need to go past the tagline, but if you have applications that simply can’t go down or slow down, we think you’ll find it meaningful.
December 21st, 2011
Ron Lee
Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Tom Bittman’s opening comment, “Welcome to the peak of the Cloud hype cycle”, was very appropriate. Tom covers virtualization and cloud computing environments, and questions like: What to do about them, how to implement them and how to manage them dominated the session topics. Gartner Datacenter is an interesting conference, because it is where the IT community comes to get an update on what is going on, find out what’s new and to see what everyone else is up to.
One session I particularly enjoyed was “Private Cloud Computing at Bank of America – One Year Later”, presented by Bank of America. The room was full, and the audience was engaged and generating questions on an insightful success story. A year ago, Prentice Dees from Bank of America presented on the company’s plans to create a private cloud. . This year, he came back to declare victory and report on their success. They had successfully built and were operating a basic private cloud that could deploy VMs with applications installed automatically in 3 hours or less. This was a compression down from 60 days using the old manual processes. Prentice did admit that this was only 1/3 of the problem. Figuring out what to do and how to use it took just as long as before and were still the dominant costs of getting a new service deployed in a business unit. It was a good reminder that, in spite of all the technology, the key factors for success are still people and process.
I think I have some reading and listening to do so I can better understand what customers need from cloud computing. I see hints of things to come in fabric computing and the DevOps methodologies. As always things are moving faster and the abstractions are becoming greater, but sometimes customers need to be able to dive deep into the infrastructure and see what is going on. That is what Virtual Instruments is here for.
December 12th, 2011
Len Rosenthal
So far, December has been a very exciting and successful month for Virtual Instruments! We opened the month with the fantastic news that the company was ranked number 6 on Forbes’ list of America’s Most Promising Companies. The list featured 100 privately held up-and-comers with compelling business models, strong management teams, notable customers, strategic partners and precious investment capital.
On the evening of December 7th, at a private event in Los Angeles, we had the honor of winning the Red Herring 100 Global Award, which recognizes information technology product and service companies from over 40 nations who have demonstrated the most innovative technologies and have the potential to be market changing companies.
Our inclusion in these prestigious rankings with some of the most groundbreaking technologies and businesses is a real honor and not something we take for granted.
Several hours earlier on December 7th and “across the pond” in London, we had another piece of exciting news – Virtual Instruments, in conjunction with The Lloyd’s Banking Group, won the 2011 SVC Innovation Award for innovative and effective use of technology that supports storage, virtualization and cloud computing initiatives.
A few weeks earlier, VirtualWisdom was named a Technology Excellence Medalist for 2011 “Infrastructure Innovation of the Year” by BCS. A few weeks before that, Virtual Instruments’ customer, Unilever, won “Enterprise Project of the Year” from Datacentre Solutions Magazine, in large part due to their use of VirtualWisdom.
Over the last year, Virtual Instruments has experienced tremendous growth in all key business areas and we are proud that both VI and our customers are being recognized so publicly.
November 29th, 2011
Ron Lee
Hi! You’ll be seeing more of me throughout the coming weeks and months, and I thought I would start out with an introduction. My name is Ron Lee and I am the new Technical Marketing Manager at Virtual Instruments. This marks the end of my first month at Virtual Instruments and it has been great fun.
Before joining the Virtual Instruments team, I was with VMware helping virtualization dramatically change data center management. VMware has done a fantastic job of making virtualization happen and making it possible to create the cloud data centers we are all working on. I came to Virtual Instruments to help the team begin creating the tools, metrics and practices needed to deliver apps in private cloud data centers.
In this role, I have been tasked with exploring and explaining a lot of the details of how Virtual Instruments products and services help companies resolve mission-critical virtual infrastructure issues. One of the first things I am doing is looking at our customer use cases, so you will mostly see me on the SAN Best Practices blog with a strong emphasis on application delivery. Application delivery is closely tied to the company’s founding mission, and is a hot topic for our business customers.
In addition, earlier this month, I was able to attend the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco with the Virtual Instruments team and spent a majority of the day in the company’s booth. The nice thing about Storage Decisions is that it attracts a qualified audience and brings in people from around the San Francisco Bay Area. Since this was my first show with Virtual Instruments, I was looking forward to hearing about customer challenges at the storage level for data centers, and I heard some interesting stories. For instance, I heard numbers like 180 switches and thousands of fibre channel port in a single data center. I was thinking of how long it would take to just visit each switch or array to look for issues before they caused an outage. It is challenges like this that help make it clear how necessary Virtual Instruments is for so many of our customers, and I look forward to sharing more tips and updates on how we are helping to enable businesses migrate to the private cloud. Have a SAN virtualization story you’d like to share? Drop me a line on the blog.
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