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 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.
October 31st, 2011
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.
October 14th, 2011
Len Rosenthal Virtual Instruments exhibited and presented at the recent Fall Storage Networking World (SNW), held in Orlando this week. There were at least 1,000 IT and storage managers in attendance. Our booth was once again overflowing with storage managers, storage architects and IT managers hungry to get control of their exploding storage investments and to find new ways of ensuring performance and availability of their increasingly virtualized infrastructures. This is a great event for us as it isn’t overrun with large vendor showcase booths that distract from discussion of the technology.
What this means is that SNW has evolved into a conference more focused on smaller companies with new and innovative storage technologies. SNW attendees come to see real innovation, which is really coming from the start-ups. Virtualization, private clouds, and flash continue to be the hot topics and SNW continues to be one of the industry’s best sources of innovation on display.
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