Analyst & Press Opinions
The press and industry analysts frequently comment about Virtual Instruments and the critical problems that we solve for enterprise data centers. Below are some excerpts from some of the recent public statements by members of the press and analyst community.
Recent Analyst Opinions on Virtual Instruments:
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"The purpose-built SAN monitoring hardware solutions like those from Virtual Instruments have the ability to provide even greater capabilities. Because they are non-intrusive and provide out-of-band measurements and analysis, they capture information in real-time without affecting storage network performance. Monitoring products based on discrete polling intervals simply can’t do this. The value of this approach is that it supports a more efficient and detailed analysis by being able to look at every transaction between every element in the storage infrastructure stack. Also, because these solutions are real-time, they won’t miss performance spikes or bottlenecks that SAN switch software can easily miss. A real-time product that’s examining each fibre channel frame would immediately detect the problem when it occurs. In fact, in most cases, it will forewarn the storage administrator of an impending issue prior to its interruption of critical applications or processes." |
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"VirtualWisdom components are simple and easy to deploy with software that installs in minutes. The probes are downstream from the traffic access points, and consequently create no impact on performance of the live links. IT departments can be monitoring their entire SAN infrastructure in a matter of hours In order to identify problems with SAN performance, it’s important to have the complete picture of traffic in the SAN environment; that includes applications, servers, switches, and the SAN itself. Without that comprehensive view, IT departments spend precious time tracking the source of performance issues and service outages causing financial loss to the business. This process is not only repeated with the next incident, but the approach itself is reactionary and costly. Companies that find themselves in a never-ending catch up game of acquiring storage to meet virtualization demands can alleviate those budgetary drains with the SAN instrumentation solution provided by VirtualWisdom. Understanding the end-to-end performance of a SAN environment can help companies not only better utilize existing resources and plan more effectively for storage growth, but help mitigate risks from outages that can impact the business. ESG Lab examined all the components provided by VirtualWisdom, and found a comprehensive solution that was not only easy to implement, but provided a unique end-to-end view of a SAN infrastructure. The wealth of data elements captured and collected in easy to read views was impressive, all while creating no performance impact on the SAN environment itself. IT organizations looking to move services to a private cloud can use the monitoring and reporting capabilities of VirtualWisdom to help fulfill service level agreements related to performance and availability and minimize the costs associated with providing the high level SLAs required for cloud services Bringing all the elements of a SAN environment together (link monitoring, switch monitoring, virtual server monitoring), Virtual Instruments has built a complete SAN monitoring solution that effectively provides the visibility needed to proactively and intelligently manage SAN resources. Application owners, virtualization administrators, and storage administrators can all benefit from the holistic approach to performance optimization provided by Virtual Instruments, and return real capital savings back to the business." |
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"Traditional infrastructure or SAN monitoring tools can give a pretty good picture of what’s going on. However, polling a server HBA, switch or storage device every 20 minutes or even every 1 minute, as many of these tools typically do, can miss critical data. This results in the administrator receiving no real information about what’s causing latency between an application and its storage device, or an intermittent link failure. It’s these blind spots that plague SAN managers who are responsible for maintaining uptime and performance levels in mission critical environments. Combining real-time data from the hardware SAN Performance Probe with information from software probes monitoring VMware and other fabric devices, gives VirtualWisdom the unique ability to eliminate these blind spots. The real-time, continuous, out of band monitoring provided by FC probes fills in missing data points providing faster problem resolution, better uptime and reduced overall risk." |
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"While other management tools can provide snapshots of an incident as it occurs, VI's ability to capture SAN traffic in-band provides a more complete view of what is happening – akin to having a high-definition video recording of an incident instead of incremental snapshots." |
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"Problems need to be identified fast and resolved quickly - or, for instance, SLAs could be violated - and a tool to give a clear infrastructure view in real time is really a must to achieve that. Virtual Instruments is one company dedicated to addressing this type of problem. VirtualWisdom carries out analysis of SAN I-O traffic in real time - and can do this in relation to individual business critical applications running within a virtualised setup. This cross-domain, vendor-neutral, view facilitates rapid and precise performance tuning and fault diagnosis. I see this as a must have for large FC SAN users" |
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"VirtualWisdom is the only solution that can give you a real time, comprehensive, and deterministic view of every transaction that is flowing through your fiber channel SAN and how those transaction completion times are impacting the performance of physical and virtual workloads" |
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"Solutions like use physical layer taps and fibre channel frame inspection to gather real-time data from every device and the network itself, not relying on periodic sampling of status codes. They can capture and record transaction information showing the relationships between all the devices in the environment and present a moving picture of the entire infrastructure that admins can ‘rewind’ to the specific point in time when a problem was reported." |
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"Keeping these cloud infrastructures up and running efficiently requires better information than is available from the usual data center tools. What’s needed is real-time information taken continuously from all devices and network components in the environment. Such data, that can be recorded and replayed from any point in time, can help to quickly resolve problems and keep system utilization and availability high." |
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"VirtualWisdom goes deeper than any competitive solution I've seen, using physical traffic access points (or TAPs) to collect enhanced metrics (queue depths, for example) and locate hard-to-find sources of contention directly from the storage network itself--with visibility into every fibre channel frame and every transaction. This level of insight is critical: in demanding virtualized infrastructures, it's often not enough to poll software agents installed on each component of the SAN at 5 to 15 minute intervals to get to the bottom of a tricky performance problem. Real-time, wire-level visibility is required." |
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"To extend virtualization to the business-critical and performance-critical applications that are under the ownership of dedicated application support teams, the IT Operations group who owns the virtual environment must provide accurate and credible performance assurances for the virtual infrastructure that will be supporting these applications. In order for enterprises to go from 30% virtualized to 80% virtualized significant changes will have to be made to how virtualized systems and virtualized applications are managed. Enterprises are not going to be able to get to 80% virtualized, unless the virtualized environment can promise and deliver a higher level of true performance assurance than what is in place in the physical environment. This will only be possible through the use of new tools and new approaches that allow both infrastructure owners, and applications owners to understand the true performance (response time) of their respective layers of the stack in a much more real time, comprehensive, deterministic, and relevant manner than what is in place in the physical world today. The core problem with all approaches that attempt to manage both physical and virtual infrastructures is that they rely upon infrequent (every 5 minutes, or even every 15 minute) polling of commodity data that is worthless when it comes to assessing the actual performance of a physical or virtual infrastructure in support of its applications and workloads. At the infrastructure performance management layer, the key is to measure the latency of the response of the infrastructure to requests on the part of the workloads, and to do so comprehensively (across every single request), in real time (as the transaction occurs, not some time thereafter), and deterministically (based upon the actual latency information, not an average, nor a synthetically created approximation of the transaction). Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom is the only IPM solution on the market today that is able to provide real-time, comprehensive, and deterministic Infrastructure Response Time information for Fibre Channel attached storage arrays to the team supporting a virtual (or for that matter a physical) infrastructure. This information is not available to the team supporting a virtual infrastructure via any other mechanism or solution." |
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"Most traditional monitoring tools poll devices and collect data at intervals usually 5-15 minutes apart - or longer. Solutions like VirtualWisdom from Virtual Instruments, which uses fibre channel network taps to gather real-time information about the infrastructure, could be the cornerstone management platform for this new IT focus." |
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"Plagued by frequent unplanned outages in a relatively simple SAN environment, a Texas health care facility turned to Virtual Instruments to provide the requisite insight and visibility for its new, much larger and complex virtualized SAN infrastructure. As a result, unplanned outages have been all but eliminated and the IT team is far more proactive, resolving issues before they impact the business." |
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"As more companies consider deploying mission-critical applications in a virtualized environment or look into deploying private clouds, it will be imperative for them to have complete real-time visibility into the response times of their virtual and physical IT infrastructure. Without the visibility enabled by solutions such as VirtualWisdom, they will be flying blind, exposing their businesses to needless risk and wasted IT resources." |
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"While no longer the most hyped protocol, Fibre Channel is still the predominant protocol, especially when it comes to the virtualized server infrastructure. In VMware environments, as much as 75% of installations are sharing storage via Fibre Channel. This is a staggering percentage of market share, especially when considering the amount of marketing spent on the other protocols, and the accusations made about it being complex to manage. Fibre Channel also has the advantage of delivering the highest level of performance with the least impact on servers using the associated shared storage. The network is designed solely for storage traffic and does not have the overhead from other forms of traffic. The HBA that goes into the connecting servers manages all translation from Fibre to SCSI that the operating system would otherwise have to handle." |
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"The impact of server virtualization and the related virtual ecosystem requires updates to traditional performance monitoring and instrumentation approaches. … It's key to remember that, in some cases, virtual infrastructures are deployed on top of a physical fabric that may not have been designed to support the increase in virtual servers, etc. Thus, care should be taken to have visibility into potential critical choke points, especially the back-end SAN infrastructure, which is one of the most common areas where performance problems may originate." |
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"Getting access into a fabric is incredibly difficult. Using mirror and SPAN ports just doesn't cut it if you want to see what's really going on, especially when performance issues are the focus and you need to see over-the-wire latency and make sure you're not dropping frames on high-speed connections. With TAPs, administrators can figure out what they need to see, and then put a total solution in place to see it." |
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"As Fibre Channel (FC) networks increase in bandwidth from 2 to 4, 8, 16 and 40 Gbits/second over the next few years, the ability to Tap these fibers will go from nice-to-have to essential. It is 20 times less expensive to install taps as part of the initial FC network than to retrofit them later. Senior IT executives and CTOs should ensure that future SAN fibre networks are specified to specifically include Taps. The additional cost (5-10%) will be much lower that having to retrofit them later." |
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"Performance tiering measures real-time application latency, or the amount of time applications wait for the storage system to provide data, through network-connected, physical-layer traffic access points, or TAPs. These passive, out-of-band appliances capture network traffic without affecting performance. Systems like VirtualWisdom from Virtual Instruments take this storage transaction data and display the activity between servers and storage, including response times, queue depth and average utilization rates for each storage resource." |
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"As IT environments become more complex, with increasing use of server and storage virtualization, being able to monitor and analyze the infrastructure across multiple domains is critical to meeting service level agreements. Deploying network TAPs to improve availability, utilization, and performance has been a best practice in the IP network industry for decades. The concept of an integrated TAP and fibre-optic patch panel should simplify and lower the cost of deploying TAPs for Fibre Channel networks." |
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"Consistently, customers described the NetWisdom/VirtualWisdom products and VI Probes and TAPs as industry-leading technologies, as essential diagnostic tools for experienced and highly-knowledgeable storage engineers and administrators, and often as the only solution they considered. Users reported that VI products were especially well-suited for complex, multi-vendor, dynamic, high-performance and/or growing environments." |
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"What's been unique about Virtual Instruments is there's nobody else that does what they do. They don't have a competitor right now that can provide the type of information they can collect. They've been gold standard for this technology for quite a while." |
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"Recommendations: Implement real-or near-real-time storage dashboards, which show or highlight key performance indicators, such as utilization rates, bottlenecks, device contention and error rates. …Organizations do not need to be tied to strict SRM tools, because they can obtain some of the key information and functionality from performance tools, such as Virtual Instruments…. Most organizations have not implemented the basic …reporting tools and have no near-real-time or real-time daily dashboards, which report on the status of the storage infrastructure. Until these capabilities exist in the IT department, the storage infrastructure cannot be managed efficiently. It is recommended that complementary monitoring tools be used to verify the correct functioning of an increasingly automated system. … Storage admins and IT managers must never forget how to tune storage systems, and must have the instrumentation available to prove that the systems are making the correct decisions as directed by the policies and service requirements. As automation and virtualization increases, organizations will need to invest more in monitoring to verify the correct operation of the storage infrastructure." |
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"Most array-based SAN management tools are deficient in their ability to detect and help remediate storage network performance problems. Organizations in high performance, high growth SAN environments should evaluate heterogeneous tools such as Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom which can provide valuable metrics, trending data and end-to-end visibility on performance bottlenecks." |
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"In a virtual environment, with rapidly changing dynamic workload and resource allocation, continuous measurement to establish performance requirements is vital. Because virtualization introduces the abstraction of computing resources, traditional physical performance and availability measurements (CPU, memory, process throughput, cache utilization, etc) are simply not effective in a virtual environment. Real root causes are masked in multiple layers of complexity, leading to drawn-out triage conference calls and time consuming buck-passing. It also makes it difficult to plan utilization and resource requirements, delaying virtualization expansion, and reducing the ROI of virtualization deployments." |
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"Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom aims to provide this end-to-end runtime visibility and cut through the finger-pointing between server and storage vendors when performance issues arise in production. Their solution is worth a look to augment in-place or other vendor solutions that may provide insight only during the initial capacity planning and provisioning phases. It's clear that even the best-planned virtual environment often behaves differently at production scale; VirtualWisdom can tell you why." |
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"Virtual Instruments addresses the complex and thorny issues associated with large-scale Fibre Channel SAN performance optimization, availability, root cause fault analysis and overprovisioned switches. Its SAN infrastructure, vendor-agnostic VirtualWisdom family of deep monitoring and analysis hardware and software products provides real-time visibility into SAN traffic flows, actual performance and use at the fabric level. This enables IT personnel responsible for managing Fibre Channel SAN and virtualized server infrastructures to have real-time visibility of application-to-SAN performance, respond faster to issues affecting availability, correlate trends over time, verify SLA performance, and reduce capital and operating SAN-related expenditures. IT professionals should consider the Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom solution as an integral part of their cost optimization and infrastructure modernization strategy as they strive to meet demanding user SLA requirements within constricted budgets." |
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"Regardless of whether systems are real or virtual, it has been hard to find any way to evaluate the big picture and then drill down to perform detailed inspection upon the infrastructure. We simply lack the instrumentation to give us the data for planning, performance management, routine monitoring, compliance, or troubleshooting. Virtual Infrastructure Optimization holistically assesses the entire virtual infrastructure, and provides the administrator with the data necessary to make intelligent decisions about capacity, utilization, and performance for every layer of the infrastructure - network, server, storage, and applications. In the Taneja Group's view, virtual infrastructure optimization will be a pivotal technology in defining the capabilities of the next generation data center. The performance management-oriented VIO solutions actually clear away the fog, and let you see the road in the form of meaningful, correlated data across multiple elements in the data center. We're seeing an increasing number of solutions on the market, such as Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom, that can take action on real-time infrastructure data." |
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"Virtual Instruments is expanding despite the difficult economic climate, as demand for its VirtualWisdom SAN performance optimization tools grows due to the increasing deployment rates of production-level server virtualization. As virtualization projects become larger and more complex, demand for more-sophisticated performance analysis tools, particularly those that can delve deeper and identify the root cause of traffic bottlenecks and inefficiencies, is bound to rise. Virtualization still relies on the physical infrastructure underneath but can end up hiding what's really going on. VI enables real-time fiber channel network transaction monitoring, analysis and diagnosis and runs the VirtualWisdom enterprise monitoring software, which is aimed at data storage administrators looking to optimize performance and reduce the risk of downtime…. There's no real direct competition for what Virtual Instruments is doing." |
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"There's urgency in enterprise data centers today to deploy virtualization to improve server utilization and reduce overall IT expenditures. However, broad deployment of virtualization for mission-critical applications has been limited by the lack of visibility into how the networked storage I/O affects the performance of applications deployed on virtual machines. The best way to overcome that hurdle is to implement instrumentation and measurement tools within the networked storage infrastructure that extract real-time transaction performance information. Virtual Instruments can provide this view with a comprehensive, real-time performance analysis solution designed to enable virtualization technology to be deployed with confidence across all mission critical workloads." |
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"IT departments are having a harder time troubleshooting problems because virtualization creates additional layers of abstraction in the data center. When problems arise you need very deep insights into the data path. The only way to truly visualize what is going on is some form of active monitoring. VirtualWisdom allows IT managers to factor in latency and I/O availability, which can be critical issues in determining performance." |
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"One of the more significant challenges a SAN administrator faces today is the lack of visibility they have regarding I/O behavior. This failing makes it difficult to optimize performance and utilization of their infrastructure assets. The past practice of blindly adding more ports to solve a performance issue is no longer an acceptable first choice in today's climate of fiscal frugality. What administrators have been lacking is clear visibility and understanding of how I/O is navigating the infrastructure, where the congestion is concentrated and where the underutilized ports exist. Such knowledge, if readily available, would allow them to optimize their SAN by increasing port utilization, increasing performance and saving scarce cash. Virtual Instruments is a company that delivers solutions to monitor application-to-SAN transaction performance and with their announcement of VirtualWisdom, an optimization tool for the virtualized SAN environment, they have addressed the challenge of management and optimization of virtualized SAN's. Tools such as VirtualWisdom will become more common place in the administrators IT toolbox." |
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"Network problems that increase costs and hinder performance can manifest in many ways. For instance, there may be FC scaling problems or lack of routing, SAN over- or under-provisioning and more general difficulties in SAN troubleshooting. Overlaying VMware can exacerbate these because it has very limited visibility into the SAN infrastructure. Tools designed for a virtualised infrastructure which still maintain deep visibility into the SAN—helping to optimise SAN utilisation and speed problem resolution—are a must for a mission-critical application, not a nice to have. VI has a mission to enhance its tools to offer a solution for organisations to realise the full economic benefits of a virtualised IT infrastructure. It has now plugged a measurement gap which virtualisation created. VMware should also be happy." |
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"Virtualization and SAN optimization solutions like VirtualWisdom are becoming essential to creating resource-efficient data centers as they lower operational and acquisition costs and enable the successful implementation of virtualization." |
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"SANs are major corporate investments and availability issues can ultimately place a business at risk. Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom solution is a Fibre Channel performance monitoring tool for SANs that helps organisations to simplify SAN administration and ensure that SAN performance and availability are optimised. Through its real-time dashboards, trigger-based alerts, and analytics facilities, SAN administrators can proactively address (or prevent) SAN performance and availability issues, provide metrics to demonstrate critical application service level compliance, and optimise existing SAN infrastructure rather than 'blindly' adding new components. Unlike traditional SRM tools that interrogate components, VirtualWisdom provides visibility into SAN traffic flows and, importantly, actual performance and utilization." |
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"Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom solution can be augmented with existing Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions to provide fabric-level traffic data that helps organisations to detect and prevent potential availability issues, proactively manage and tune performance (and ensure that application Service Level Agreement targets are met), and effectively plan capacity to optimise SAN-related expenditure. VI can help organisations optimise their SAN and virtualisation infrastructure – dashboards provide a real-time summary of SAN performance and faults, and tables, graphs, and charts may be used to summarise, analyse, and compare SAN performance over time. VirtualWisdom also supports automated alerts in response to faults, filters, and error conditions." |
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"Troubleshooting application issues is going to get harder as the number of physical and virtual objects in the data path continue to increase. These potential problems all underscore the fact that when you choose a virtualization platform, you have to consider its management software ecosystem. Application troubleshooting in complex virtual infrastructures will require you to adopt new tools or to use some of your existing tools in new ways. Finally, how you architect the virtual infrastructure should be an even greater concern. The virtual infrastructure must be designed so that administrators can quickly isolate and resolve faults. A few vendors (e.g. Virtual Instruments, Replicate Technologies) are offering virtual or physical probes as part of their virtual infrastructure diagnostic software stack, and I expect more to follow." |
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"Virtual Instruments provides complete insight into storage infrastructure performance and enables storage administrators to be both proactive and reactive. With data presented by VirtualWisdom, they can better utilize existing resources, support infrastructure changes, and plan for smart expansion. They can also quickly identify and resolve issues before they impact application availability or reliability. Users have the information they need to better manage the datacenter overall — to accelerate system upgrades and virtualization deployments, assure SLAs and compliance, and improve continuity — factors that imply increased cost savings and ROI. VirtualWisdom delivers visibility into the performance and operation of SAN infrastructures by collecting and analyzing key performance, availability, and protocol metrics on every I/O transaction over storage links in real time. This visibility enables storage administrators to identify and resolve issues quickly while ensuring optimal performance and facilitating strict policy adherence." |
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"I also like Virtual Instruments — a lot. From where I'm standing, these former Finisar-ites are doing what the mother company never could: they are telling the truth about the inefficiencies of FC SANs. They have chosen (smartly) to take the high road and to message that they are merely a companion product for the big iron SAN that will help you get more value from your investment. True enough. But it stops short of telling the real story about port inefficiency, poor gear performance, the performance hit caused by a lot of the value add stuff that vendors are adding and we are buying even though it doesn't really contribute much value. Whether you want to see how bad your SAN sucks, or are seeking to collect fact based info you can use in your next vendor negotiation, VI is the stuff." |
Recent Press Opinions on Virtual Instruments
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"We are determining the I/O profiles of our applications. VirtualWisdom allows you to dig in and understand why applications are behaving as they are. The TAPs let us see the demands that applications are putting on the storage infrastructure, meaning we are not as reliant on the Oracle database administrator or other application teams giving us this information. We have equivalent metrics, so we can say ‘yes, we agree, or ‘we don’t agree’. For me, it is all about not being reactive, but being proactive to alleviate bottlenecks before we actually see them, then working out how best to satisfy demand. Throwing hardware at stuff just moves the bottleneck somewhere else, from the storage to the Unix system or whatever; it does not really fix the underlying issues. It is also about juggling things, seeing exactly what is going on and deciding whether to make a strategic investment in hardware or negate the need to purchase new hardware at that point in time.” said Simon Close, IT Manager at Morrison’s." |
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"Choosing the best out of the previous two years was by no means a small feat. After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed down our list from 1,100 potential companies to 100 winners. It was an extremely difficult process. Virtual Instruments should be extremely proud of its achievement; the competition for the Red Herring Top 100 was fierce. The Top 100 Global are truly the best of the best." |
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"VirtualWisdom shows actual application latencies and lets admin staff detect and fix SAN-related problems faster. " |
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"As datacentres and private clouds become more dense and more complex, the impact of poor performance becomes more widespread. IT today is driven by the SLAs they have concluded with the customers; the enterprise's business units. It's hard to figure out why the organisation is not getting the service it needs if you don't have visibility into both the SAN and the Ethernet network. As you add complexity, and especially virtualisation of servers, networking and storage, the hardware becomes increasingly abstracted. This is the point of course but, in the process, the underlying hardware's performance becomes even more important as it becomes less visible. VirtualWisdom can prevent the over-provisioning resulting from lack of network visibility, and get below the virtualisation layer that obfuscates the hardware." |
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"Improving storage performance is often viewed as an expensive option that only should be undertaken when the current performance levels can no longer be tolerated. This approach causes an interrupt-driven, all hands on deck, firefighting approach to the problem. Instead, performance optimization should be a task that IT administrators perform on a regular--if not daily--basis that allows for performance tuning to become a regular part of the work flow. This change in attitude toward performance optimization is going to require the addition of two capabilities to the IT tool chest. The first change in attitude is that performance optimization can no longer be considered a "project" that occurs once a year or once a quarter. No longer can tools be rolled out, measurements taken, and diagnoses to the sick patient delivered. Instead performance needs to be like a "wellness" program where it is constantly measured on a daily basis. The 2nd attitude change, and this may be less popular, is to consider a new position in the enterprise data center that is focused on performance management. It may be time to have an individual that crosses the functional boundaries of applications, servers, hypervisors, and storage to take a holistic view of the enterprise from a performance perspective. This individual would need a tool that gave them that holistic view that they would constantly monitor for performance improvement opportunities. Unlike performance optimization as it is done today, where you are waiting for something to go wrong, this individual will look for something that can go "more right" so that the existing infrastructure can be leveraged to its fullest. " |
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"The solution to the I/O bottleneck depends on where the problem lies: in the network or in the storage domain. Part of the problem is visibility. Administrators can't see what's going on inside the storage environment, so they don't know how to fix it. Fortunately, we're seeing some tools that can help you figure out the problem and address it more easily. Fibre Channel customers, for instance, might use Virtual Instruments' performance monitoring product for storage area networks (SANs) to optimize performance and availability." |
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"Some companies are doing better than others. When I report that one of them, a SAN monitoring company called Virtual Instruments, claims to have increased its employee numbers from 60 fifteen months ago to around 140 now, you'd have to presume it's doing something that systems managers like, and that they like it enough to buy the company's products. " |
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"Because the SANs that underlie the world's data centres and private cloud infrastructures have often grown organically, trouble-shooting them can be a major headache. The complexity of those SANs – compounded by the addition of both storage and server virtualization – has led other areas of the business to treat storage as the prime suspect whenever there are application performance issues. By analyzing SAN traffic, VirtualWisdom makes it easier both to locate the real source of a problem, and to optimize the storage network for best application and cloud performance." |
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"The hardware probe sits on a network and samples Fibre Channel frames that go past the probe. Nobody but Virtual Instruments does that in the Fibre Channel world." |
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"VirtualWisdom provides real-time insight into the performance, utilization, and availability of virtualized servers, SANs, and storage to help prevent I/O performance issues and reduce the risk of virtualizing mission-critical applications. It provides real-time and historical insights into application latency and bandwidth consumption, giving enterprises early detection and advanced notification of device failures, congestion, and transmission errors. And because it can monitor across servers, networks, and storage, customers can minimize the risks of deploying business-critical applications into virtualized data centers and private clouds while improving SLA (service level agreement) compliance." |
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"VirtualWisdom 3.0 platform is the only offering that can ensure the performance of business-critical applications in a virtualised environment through real-time analysis of SAN I/O traffic data." |
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"VirtualWisdom pinpoints the source of an I/O bottleneck and identifies specific elements for further troubleshooting (an overloaded switch port or a misconfigured HBA, for example). VirtualWisdom also includes a DVR-like performance recorder to simplify historical performance analysis, and a modeling interface to identify hardware degradation before an application performance problem surfaces. In my discussions with users, VirtualWisdom truly shines in large, complex and performance-sensitive FC SANs, such as those supporting Tier-1 enterprise business applications (real-time trading, order processing, and ERP systems). VirtualWisdom has become an indispensable tool for organizations as they virtualize these Tier-1 business apps, and the combination of deep, real-time visibility and rapid diagnosis sets Virtual Instruments apart in the VIPM category." |
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"Unilever’s demand for raw storage was growing by approximately 50% per year. Realising that this level of growth and change in a physical environment was both impossible and unaffordable, the company went down the virtualization route, deploying Virtual Instrument’s VirtualWisdom technology to provide insight into the SAN and virtualized infrastructure." |
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"Virtualization breaks most of our tried-and-true IT performance management strategies. It's not very useful, now, to know how many IOPS a particular array can deliver, or the CPU utilization on a certain host, or the bandwidth utilized on one adapter, as independent data points. They each change too often, and none provides enough information to understand how the infrastructure is responding to load. " |
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"But a proven and robust storage performance monitoring tool like Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom is essential in today's increasingly complex virtual environments. Either way, keeping tabs on your storage performance is essential today." |
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"Some companies are just on a huge ramp-up, such as storage-area network provider Virtual Instruments. The 110-person company plans to double its workforce this year." |
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"The judges gave the VI SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System high scores for innovation and value. One judge said the VI TAP Patch Panel System is "a unique FC monitoring and management tool," and commented on the system's great operational value if there's a network-based storage problem. Another judge predicted the VI TAP Patch Panel System will "rapidly become a must have for the very high-end enterprise." |
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"Rival storage management technologies simply don't go deep enough to give the necessary monitoring and management of SAN level data, usually travelling around fibre channel links in ever more complex ways as companies roll out more and more virtualization. A benchmarking exercise undertaken by Gartner found that the IT costs of Unilever's SAN after rolling out VirtualWisdom was millions of pounds less than other consumer goods manufacturers." |
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"Simple fact is it's rare to find a solution or product in the storage and virtualization market that can truly be regarded as unique… The VI strategy is simple in that by recognizing I/O as the largest cause of application latency, VirtualWisdom's inclusion of baseline comparisons of I/O performance, bandwidth utilization and average I/O completions comfortably provide the necessary insight fundamental to any major virtualization or cloud deployment an organization may be planning for." |
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"Products from Virtual Instruments tap deep into physical and virtual infrastructure, providing data center managers with vital information needed to proactively optimize their IT cloud. Although early adopters of VIO are large data centers, I believe the technology will follow server virtualization and SANs into the mid-market and beyond, making this technology the next big wave in management of IT infrastructure." |
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"It was fascinating to recently meet up with Virtual Instruments, which offers a complete end-to-end solution for debugging SAN and VMware problems. It has probes that can (non-intrusively) sit inside your VMware environment on your server and look for all the key metrics, from the virtual machine itself through to the Fibre Channel infrastructure. Then it has software probes that sit within the fabric switches themselves, which is a huge help in finding out what's going on. VI software allows traffic data that's gathered directly from the fibre to be integrated into the information that's been collected all the way back inside your VMs, so you can instrument your entire disk performance from virtualized server to the physical array. For those of you who need to debug what's going on in a large and complicated SAN, this could well be a gift from heaven." |
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"Products like SANScreen and StorageConsole have a partial view into SAN operations in that they don't have direct access into the wires; they don't have I/O transaction-level visibility. VI does because it developed Taps which connect into the wire and copy the traffic to a data recorder for playback and analysis. The key to this is the instrumentation, from Taps into the Fibre Channel hardware to probes into VMware, with the dashboard being able to show and replay events, a TIVO for the SAN. The key appeal for customers is the ability to better match their SAN infrastructure to the needs of their virtualised server applications, meaning potentially lower purchases of SAN infrastructure and storage." |
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"VirtualWisdom® 2.0 adds SAN I/O intelligence to VMware environments, enabling administrators to balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements of I/O performance. The new offering provides real-time and historical insights into application latency and bandwidth consumption, as well as early detection and advanced notification of device failures, congestion and errors." |
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"Companies like Virtual Instruments are out to show that virtual environments can be made largely risk-free, or at least as dependable as physical systems, when it comes to critical apps. The company just came out with VirtualWisdom 2.0, a management stack designed to provide intelligent networking to enterprise SANS to ensure the most important applications and data have a reliable infrastructure at their disposal. The system features predictive analysis of configuration changes, SAN-to-LUN array analysis and a quick-deploy kit option that accommodates up to 160 switch ports and 24 storage ports. …Rather than just focusing on server performance alone, solutions like those provided by Virtual Instruments and Zing provide better management functions, integration with other technologies and visibility across mixed types of infrastructure." |
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"Virtual Instruments has introduced the SANInsight Fibre TAP Patch Panel System that will allow customers with virtualisation environments to achieve the same level of monitoring as within physical infrastructures. The TAP Patch Panel System uses existing TAP technology and integrates it with a standard patch panel. A TAP uses a passive fibre optic splitter to create an exact, out-of-band copy of the light signal passing through it, as such the device causes no traffic overhead." |
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"Virtual Instruments is the only vendor that can actually measure the latency of every Fibre Channel frame on a SAN on a continuous and deterministic basis. VI does this by putting a TAP on the fiber network, and then attaching data collection software to those ports. A very high percentage of the performance issues in storage arrays manifest themselves in the Fibre Channel latency data. It is important to note that this latency data is not available via SNMP or SMIS which are the standard management interfaces to arrays and SAN switches. The only way to get the real SAN performance data is to tap the SAN in the manner that VI is able to do, which puts VI in the position of having a uniquely valuable perspective on the performance of everything that uses the SAN." |
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"Although the use of Fibre Channel TAPs is not unique to Virtual Instruments, integrating TAPs into a fibre-optic patch panel enclosure is a differentiator. The use of a patch panel does not reduce the number of TAPs required, but it does reduce the amount of rack space, number of cable hops, insertion loss (of light) and overall costs associated with configuring SAN management environments, particularly manual labor costs." |
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"VirtualWisdom helps companies to proactively automate the monitoring and analysis of the affect the SAN has on application availability. This helps them avoid problems and anticipate performance and availability issues before users and application owners suffer the consequences." |
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"When it began its search, Unilever looked at solutions from vendors whose storage and systems it had previously deployed, but none was able to provide the real-time and historical optimisation data the company was looking for. Unilever eventually settled on Virtual Instrument's VirtualWisdom® SAN monitoring solution. Implementation took place in June and was quickly followed by staff training, and VirtualWisdom now monitors Unilever's fabrics in real-time across both UK datacentres." |
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"A benchmarking exercise undertaken by Gartner found that the IT costs of Unilever's SAN after rolling out VirtualWisdom was millions of euros less than other consumer good manufacturers." |
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"A spin-off of Finisar in 2008, Virtual Instruments is an exciting new company that has taken existing pieces of very sophisticated technology, added some more sophisticated technology, and redefined monitoring solutions for SANs in virtual operating environments. The ability of the solution to literally tap into several points on a network and constantly map the traffic information to virtual machines yields information rich in value for SAN administrators tasked at maintaining peak performance and service levels." |
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"I'm bullish on this company and product because of its ability to dramatically increase SAN utilization means the product reduces Opex, reduces Capex and quickly pays for itself. If you're an OEM, SAN integrator or a large data center manager, I recommend you learn more about what Virtual Instruments might do for you." |
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"Virtual Instruments has taken its deep expertise in SAN environments and developed a hardware/software product that allows IT administrators to gain important insights about the operation of the storage subsystem in a virtual environment. This would most certainly make it easier to do root cause analysis when something goes wrong." |
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"Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom was the only product I found to give me an overwhelming amount of data to base my decisions on, as well as help me trouble-shoot performance issues. VirtualWisdom clearly provided raw data and polished graphing utilities to help me solve my problems." |
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"HBAs, switches and disks are all involved in SAN I/O, but it is not their job to collect management information. Adding in specific hardware devices to be able to collect SAN traffic data enables the ability to audit and report on data traffic and trends. Vendors such as Virtual Instruments provide that capability, which leads to quickly identifying performance problems and behavior anomalies, as well as being able to point out potential issues that are on the verge of exceeding "best practices" thresholds and moreover, identify potential cost savings." |
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"My organization has used VirtualWisdom to solve countless issues. Each issue has more than paid for its purchase. We've used it to troubleshoot a large data warehouse performance issue, troubleshoot an SRDF replication issue, prove a dedupe solution's marketing claims, test various configurations settings for a new OS platform, find quiet times for optimal backups, and even used it to troubleshoot failing SFP issues." |
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"Virtual Instruments is a truly unique vendor, with a unique product that comes with a unique heritage. Virtual Instruments is focused upon monitoring the SAN." |
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"There is also a very nice hard dollar ROI story for VirtualWisdom. It turns out that because most enterprises do not know how utilized their SAN ports are, and which ones are either heavily utilized or not, that most enterprises dramatically over-provision SAN ports. It is often the case that VirtualWisdom pays for itself for an enterprise that is growing its storage network, since the company can recommend a dramatic reduction in expensive SAN ports on a forward going basis (and provide the data to back up that recommendation)." |
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"This means that VirtualWisdom is one of the very few products that cannot miss an issue because it happened to occur in between a 5 minute or even (in the case of some products) a one hour sampling interval." |
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"Today, you usually need to go to third party wares, like Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom, to understand SAN traffic and to drive up switch utilization efficiency. Without such tools, your data is flying blind through what is essentially a brain‐dead FC interconnect." |
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"By adding I/O intelligence to VMware environments, the VirtualWisdom platform should enable IT admins to improve the performance and availability of their infrastructure. Using real-time I/O performance measurements, admins will be able to better balance the deployment of virtual machines." |
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"The VirtualWisdom software measures I/O performance in real-time, tracks application latency and bandwidth consumption, and provides advanced notification of device failures, congestion, and errors. VirtualWisdom also produces real-time performance information from VMs on servers through the host bus adapter (HBA), out through the SAN switch and to the LUNs on disk arrays. The dashboard is designed to simplify the problem identification and resolution process by providing real-time root-cause analysis." |
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"While virtualization management systems are great for combating virtual sprawl, even a modest number of VMs can tax your I/O infrastructure without the right management tools. The dark secret about virtualization is that while it is relatively easy to partition a server into multiple instances to boost utilization, when the time comes to deliver data to the wider enterprise, those machines must still contend with the same physical I/O infrastructure. That means data coming in and going out is queued up one block at a time and processed in sequence, leading to severe bottlenecks in high workload environments." |
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"More companies will require this kind of monitoring and management as they try to expand their use of virtual servers in data centers to improve server utilization rates." |
Industry Analyst Reports
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Cloud Building – Requirements for Private Clouds: Instrumentation is Essential
Taneja Group | February 2012
Relying on traditional management products when building a private cloud is insufficient at best and can be highly risky. Real-time instrumentation is a fundamental building block when architecting private clouds. This Taneja Group report assesses the mandatory building blocks for successful private cloud deployments. -
Cloud Environments Have Familiar Storage Challenges – Just More of Them
Storage Switzerland | November 2011
This report describes the storage challenges related to implementing private cloud environments. Cloud environments have many storage challenges that are familiar to data center managers, but due to their density and abstraction, the issues become more complex and can impact a business more severely. Read on to learn some best practices to overcome these more intense challenges. -
What Your SAN Fabric Manager Software Isn’t Telling You
Storage Switzerland | December 2011
Modern SAN switches all come with SAN fabric managersoftware. But is this sufficient for enterprise data center managers to optimize performance, utilization and availability of their SANs? Read this report to see how 3rd party solutions like VirtualWisdom complement Fabric Managers. -
Product Review: Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom: A Big Window into SAN Performance, Availability and Utilization
Enterprise Strategy Group | September 2011
This ESG Lab Validation report examines VirtualWisdom and validates its capabilities to provide real-time, granular visibility of FC SAN traffic from virtual servers to the storage within the data center. -
Product Review: VirtualWisdom 3.0 & SAN Performance Probe
Storage Switzerland | September 2011
This paper reviews the key product features of the new VirtualWisdom 3.0 solution, including the SAN Performance ProbeFC8 and explains their impact on the modern data center. -
Infrastructure Performance Management for Virtualized Systems
APM Experts White Paper | March 2011
This paper describes the key role that VirtualWisdom plays in enabling enterprises to move from 30% to 80% virtualized server penetration. Infrastructure Performance Management for Virtualized Systems. -
What is a Virtualization Performance Specialist?
Storage Switzerland White Paper | March 2011
Server virtualization is certainly widespread, but while the initial results have been promising, most IT personnel feel that the benefits of virtualization could be increased. For many, they're not seeing the performance, consolidation, and resource utilization levels they had expected. -
What Your SRM Tool Isn't Telling You | Storage Switzerland White Paper | September 2010
SRM tools are designed to solve the problem of trying to manage a diverse environment with an equally diverse set of device-specific tools. To do this they provide a 'single pane of glass' from which to monitor these disparate subsystems. -
Virtual Instruments: Early Incumbents in the VIO Market
IT Brand Pulse White Paper| August 19, 2010
Privately held Virtual Instruments is a 2008 spin-out of Finisar Corporation that has established early incum-bency in the nascent market for Virtual Infrastructure Optimization (VIO), the next big wave in management of information technology. -
Optimizing Storage I/O Latency to Maximize VMware Performance
Storage Switzerland White Paper | July 2010
Storage Switzerland was briefed recently on the VirtualWisdom family of products from Virtual Instruments. In virtual server environments, storage I/O requirements are dynamic and problems can be especially difficult to resolve, especially with the monitoring tools commonly in use today. The VirtualWisdom suite takes a different technological approach to addressing many of the issues encountered when trying to optimize a SAN infrastructure. -
Reducing the Risk of Upgrading to 8Gbit FC
Storage Switzerland White Paper | July 2010
Storage Switzerland was briefed recently on the VirtualWisdom family of products from Virtual Instruments. In virtual server environments, storage I/O requirements are dynamic and problems can be especially difficult to resolve, especially with the monitoring tools commonly in use today. -
Building the Data Center for Infrastructure Visibility
Taneja Group White Paper | April 2010
Today, when we bring up the topic of "visibility" within the mission critical networks of the enterprise, most organizations turn immediately to their practices with sniffers, traffic analyzers, and trending tools – more often than not focused purely on their IP-based communication networks. But these tools can turn into nothing more than a temporary placebo when fighting performance problems, and trying to gain visibility into the infrastructure for more strategic management. -
Maximizing Tiered Stored ROI: Performance-Based Storage Tiering
Storage Switzerland White Paper | April 2010
Costs of high performance, fibre channel SAN infrastructures can be significant and storage tiering is often employed as a strategy to control those costs. However, most tiering methodologies simply prioritize groups of data based on access patterns and assume that the highest tier data should be stored on the fastest storage arrays. -
Virtual Instruments Customer Benefits Field Study
Taneja Group White Paper | March 2010
Taneja Group conducted in-depth telephone interviews with a set of Virtual Instruments (VI) customers, of varying sizes and across several industry verticals, over a five-month period in late 2009 and early 2010. -
Optimizing the Virtual Infrastructure: Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom
Taneja Group White Paper | May 2009
As virtualization is deployed in production, experienced users are demanding production-quality performance management and optimization solutions to maintain service levels. Taneja Group has identified a new category of powerful solutions now emerging to address these demands, which we have labeled Virtual Infrastructure Optimization, or VIO. -
Forcing the SAN to Grow Up
Enterprise Strategy Group White Paper | October 2009
Last century, physical servers and physical storage were physically connected over the SAN; the resulting traffic patterns, while largely unmeasured, were relatively static and somewhat predictable. A conservative (albeit expensive) design approach to accommodating those patterns—throw hardware at the problem—was normally taken, resulting in a SAN that usually worked well; except, when it didn't, often with catastrophic consequences! Virtual Instruments, a private equity-backed spin-off from Finisar (a leading vendor in Fiber Optic Network Test Systems), has the solution: providing SAN managers much-needed LAN-style monitoring capabilities. -
What is Virtual Infrastructure Optimization?
Taneja Group White Paper | February 2009
Server virtualization is certainly widespread, but while the initial results have been promising, most IT personnel feel that the benefits of virtualization could be increased. For many, they're not seeing the performance, consolidation, and resource utilization levels they had expected. -
NetWisdom SAN I/O Intelligence
Butler Group Technology Audit | January 2009
Large organisations are increasingly dependent on complex Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructures for the delivery of business-critical applications and data. SANs are major corporate investments and availability issues can ultimately place a business at risk. Virtual Instruments' NetWisdom solution is a Fibre Channel performance monitoring tool for SANs that helps organisations to simplify SAN administration and ensure that SAN performance and availability are optimised. Through its real-time dashboards, trigger-based alerts, and analytics facilities SAN administrators can proactively address (or prevent) SAN performance and availability issues, provide metrics to demonstrate critical application service level compliance, and optimise existing SAN infrastructure rather than 'blindly' adding new components. Unlike traditional Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools that interrogate components, NetWisdom provides visibility into SAN traffic flows and, importantly, actual performance and utilisation.
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