• image description
October 31st, 2011

Why Isn’t Brocade Putting Its Customers’ Interest First?

John Thompson

After three years of partnering with VI to help improve the performance and availability of the largest and most mission-critical SANs on the planet, Brocade has announced its intention to compete with us.  Although this is a great validation of the essential need for VirtualWisdom within the Brocade customer base, the tactics Brocade is using to discourage their customers from deploying VirtualWisdom borders on anti-competitive, if not monopolistic, behavior.

For years, Brocade and VI sales and services personnel have worked together in many accounts to help identify and resolve SAN and storage problems that Brocade couldn’t resolve themselves.  In every situation, we resolved the problem, identified potential future problems, and helped the customer regain confidence in the Brocade products.  I guess we were a little too successful as Brocade now recognizes the need for solutions like VirtualWisdom and has desires to bring out similar capabilities over the coming years.   In an effort to create fear and uncertainty within its customer base, Brocade has recently issued several technical support bulletins that are implying VI products may cause “fabric compatibility issues” or performance issues with their switches.  This is simply not true.

The overwhelming majority of VI customers deploy VirtualWisdom with Brocade switches and directors, which not surprisingly, reflects their market share in the FC SAN market.  If you look at all of our customers, VirtualWisdom software is deployed across HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Fiber Channel switch ports, and TENS OF THOUSANDS of storage targets are instrumented with our SANInsight TAPs and Performance Probe hardware devices.  To our knowledge, not a single device is experiencing any interoperability or performance issues due to VI products. The reality is just the opposite; we dramatically improve the reliability and performance of FC SANs.

We encourage Brocade to be honest with our mutual customers and recognize the critical and unique value that VI brings to enterprise FC SAN deployments.  We continue to be open to the idea of partnering with Brocade to address customer’s performance and availability challenges.  But, given their recent actions, this might be challenging. For our current and future customers, you can rest assured that we will continue to help you maximize the performance and availability of your SANs, virtualized and evolving private cloud infrastructure.

September 12th, 2011

CEO Perspective on Our VMworld VirtualWisdom 3.0 Launch

John Thompson

This year’s VMworld was a great success for Virtual Instruments: Our newest suite of products, VirtualWisdom 3.0 and the SAN Performance Probe were well accepted and valued in the analyst and media community alike.  Both groups really seemed to understand what this launch means to us as a supplier to enterprise customers.

Enterprise customers have a very special set of needs.  They typically require the most scalability, the most robust reliability, the most flexible degree of customization, and of course, unparalleled service and support.  Often, only the largest vendors have the DNA that enables them to deliver on all these requirements.  VI sells and supports SAN and virtual infrastructure optimization solutions to the biggest IT users around the globe.  And it’s not by accident.  Since our inception, we’ve been laser-focused on helping enterprise IT organizations build infrastructures that support their most mission-critical applications.

I’m very proud of the work we’ve done over the past three years, and this new generation of products further cements our position as a critical supplier to the Global 2000.  It’s also worthy to note that for the first time since our spin-out from Finisar in 2008, we offer a full complement of solutions built specifically for the enterprise buyer, fully designed, engineered, and supported by Virtual Instruments.

As further evidence of company growth and independence, our business more than tripled this past year, surpassing even our most aggressive expectations.  If you have a moment, look at our customer list, and read some of the comments they’ve made about our products and services. And if you’re a client of one of the industry analysts, ask them for their appraisal of VI and the problems that we uniquely address.  With our recent announcement, by dramatically improving the scalability, reliability, flexibility, affordability, and supportability of our products, we have truly transformed our company.  For more information on our updated suite of products, click here. Next year should be even more exciting…so stay tuned!