Press Release
Virtual Instruments' VirtualWisdom Is Austrian Lottery Winner
Real-time SAN Optimization Solution Chosen to Provide Vendor-Neutral Analysis
London, UK, 2nd November 2011 — Virtual Instruments, the leader in storage area network (SAN) and virtual infrastructure optimisation solutions, today announced that Austrian Lotteries has selected VirtualWisdom to improve storage operations and over datacentre reliability.
A commercial organisation with revenues of over € 2.6 billion in 2010, Austrian Lotteries also raises funds for sports and charities in a similar way to other lotteries in Europe, and has nearly 500 employees. Players can register to play a range of online games including Lotto, Toto (a pooled football game), instant games and Bingo. To enable this broad range of offerings, the organisation runs a network of terminals to cater to customers located across Austria and manages over 150 terabytes of data. In order to maintain the outstanding level of service its customers have come to expect, Austrian Lotteries treats data security, system reliability, response time, and business continuity as top priorities.
To support this organisation, its IT department runs two datacentres, both based near Vienna. Within these datacentres are several HP storage systems and approximately 600 Brocade switch ports. As all IT transactions are processed through both datacentres, a reliable storage infrastructure which ensures uninterrupted flow of all IT operations is key.
Following a detailed evaluation of several options, Austrian Lotteries’ team selected a Virtual Instruments solution comprising VirtualWisdom software and SANInsight monitoring hardware. This has given the customer a level of visibility into its SAN that it had never experienced before, one that has brought significant benefits to the organisation. VirtualWisdom checks each data packet going through the Fibre-Channel SAN enabling the IT administrators to analyse the storage I/O with unprecedented, real-time granularity. It was important to be able to detect any application performance degradation before affecting users and this hardware/software combination quickly and easily identifies failures of connected devices. VirtualWisdom also spots overloaded ports or non-authorised traffic and monitors storage I/O data from the server to the storage volume to deliver detailed end-to-end analysis.
VirtualWisdom monitors switch performance in real-time, allowing the IT team to set individual thresholds and alerts and to get overall comprehensive view of the health of their SAN fabric. Unlike competing alternatives, the Virtual Instruments solution checks all switches in the SAN, irrespective of vendor; once a highly utilised or underutilised port is detected, the administrator is able to balance the load very quickly, avoiding performance bottlenecks. Furthermore, VirtualWisdom detects failed multi-pathing links and identifies sub-optimised links. With VirtualWisdom, IT administrators can analyse historical performance trending, properly plan SAN capacity planning, and design optimal backup scenarios.
“We use VirtualWisdom and SANInsight monitoring products to get a detailed and comprehensive view of our SAN performance so that we can take the necessary steps before performance degradation occurs. This ensures that neither the infrastructure nor the processes are affected,” says Erich Eckel, IT Manager at Austrian Lotteries. “With the data provided by Virtual Instruments we can now make informed decisions to maximise utilisation, availability and performance on every level of our infrastructure such as networks, servers, and storage. This has simplified our storage management enormously.”
Virtual Instruments has also reduced the amount of time it takes to identify non-critical failures from days to hours and sometimes even minutes; for the gambling organisation it is now possible to run an analysis and to find a solution long before a field engineer arrives. As a result, any potential downtime of the production system is reduced to a minimum. This has allowed the IT team to guarantee uninterruptible operation of their IT infrastructure and ensure business continuity. “Our business is gaming but when talking about IT, you should never rely on luck but on solid solutions like VirtualWisdom. There was no real alternative for us; storage vendors provide tools which mainly monitor information within their systems but not across the entire SAN. It was important for us to get vendor-neutral performance data on a server to LUN basis. Virtual Instruments was the only vendor to provide this data at the level of detail we need,” continued Eckel.
“Austrian Lotteries chose VirtualWisdom because of its ability to offer independent monitoring and analysis, real-time reporting and for its ease of integration into the existing datacentres,” said Philip Maurer, Account Manager at Virtual Instruments’ channel partner LB Systems. “From implementation through to production the process was quick and seamless. The advantages of having a complete, granular and real-time view of the SAN have once again proven invaluable.”
“Time and time again we have been told by our customers of the importance of being able to view and analyse the entire, multi-vendor SAN rather than individual components,” said Chris James, EMEA Marketing Director, at Virtual Instruments. “A network is more than the sum of its parts and should be monitored comprehensively. With VirtualWisdom we allow organisations to see inside their SANs and see exactly what is going on in real-time.”
About Virtual Instruments
Virtual Instruments offers the award-winning VirtualWisdom and SANInsight virtual infrastructure optimisation solution that provide deep monitoring and analysis of how the virtualised IT infrastructure and SAN affect business-critical application performance. Global 2000 customers across a broad range of industries achieve significant cost savings in virtualisation and SAN deployments by optimising utilisation, performance and availability of IT resources. Leading system and storage vendors including IBM, HP, HDS, Dell, Brocade, and EMC leverage Virtual Instruments to design and optimise SAN solutions for enterprise customers. The company was founded in June 2008 via a spin-out from Finisar Corp. The company has headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and can be found online at http://www.virtualinstruments.com
For further information:
Federica Monsone/Moya Galal
A3 Communications – the networked storage PR specialists
fred.monsone@a3communications.co.uk
moya.galal@a3communications.co.uk
+44 (0) 1252 875 203
