Resources Analyst Reports

Self-styled 'infrastructure performance management' specialist Virtual Instruments is working on a 'next generation' product that it believes will effectively and rapidly expand its market reach.

Maximizing application performance is one of IT's most important tasks.  The problem is that accurately identifying the root causes of poor performance is difficult. This often leads to the assumption that storage subsystems are the bottleneck resulting in expensive upgrades, such as adding solid state storage devices, which still may not solve the problem.

Assuring Service Throughout the Data Center with Infrastructure Performance Management. Infrastructure admins need to augment their hypervisor management solutions to achieve complete, cross‐domain infrastructure performance coverage. While this is especially true to support mission-critical applications that require high IO service levels, it’s also increasingly true for growing VDI deployments and the increasing VM densities found in more cloud-kike delivery models.

This paper covers the tighter requirements for higher speed protocols, examines the critical reasons why standard fiber cabling designs may not be “up to speed” and provides real-world experiences from field experts at VI. In addition, recommendations on the top six physical layer best practices are given.

People like to talk about change and all of the problems that change brings, but when it comes to managing the performance of business critical applications and systems, the reality is that the current state is broken. The problems with the current state are two-fold. Once, while many enterprises have hundreds or even thousands of business critical and performance critical applications few of these applications are being instrumented for the response time that they are delivering to their end users. The second problem is that the tools that are being used to manage the infrastructure that supports these applications do not provide a real-time, deterministic, and comprehensive picture into the performance (latency) that the infrastructure is delivering to these workloads.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.