VirtualInstruments

By Industry

	Financial Services A key to business agility, efficient modernization, and innovation is accurate, on-going real-time monitoring and measurement of infrastructure resources. VirtualWisdom® helps address regulatory compliance, improve application performance, increase infrastructure availability, increase revenue generation and drive down costs. From the virtual machine to the storage system, it is an innovative solution that lets Financial Services IT organizations realize the full economic benefits of networked storage and server virtualization. Learn more »
	Telecommunications Wired and wireless Telecommunications service providers face increasing business and technical challenges. With the exploding number of users and mobile devices accessing their networks, technology is changing fast and competition is intensifying. Scaling their IT organizations to support this massive growth, while maintaining business agility, is a tremendous challenge.  Virtual Instruments understands your challenges and provides the VirtualWisdom monitoring, measurement and analysis solution that will help ensure your IT organization meets its performance and availability Services Level Agreements (SLAs). Learn more »
	Retail/E-Commerce VirtualWisdom® helps address regulatory compliance, improve system performance and availability, increase revenue generation and drive down costs. From the virtual machine to the storage system, it is an innovative solution that lets retail and E-commerce IT organizations ensure availability and performance. Learn more »
	Federal Government U.S. Government civilian and defense agencies are increasingly tasked with more accountability and transparency, and agency IT staff are responding by solving problems that have caused inefficiencies. A key to efficient modernization and innovation is accurate and on-going measurement of infrastructure resources.  From the virtual machine to the storage system, VirtualWisdom® is an innovative solution that helps government IT organizations realize the full economic benefits of networked storage and server virtualization. Learn more »
	Healthcare Healthcare organizations depend on real-time data access to make life-saving decisions. Availability of patient records at all times is not just a regulatory requirement - it is critical to the level of service that an organization can provide. Healthcare IT managers must ensure the performance and availability of the applications that support emergency patient services. Learn more »
	Manufacturing Most large Manufacturing and Consumer Packaged Goods companies use Oracle or SAP to ensure competitive advantage in their global marketplace. It is essential that they keep their IT infrastructures available 24x7x365 and ensure superior application performance. Many of these enterprises have turned to VirtualWisdom, from Virtual Instruments, to monitor their business critical IT environments. It ensures that key applications are providing their maximum performance and that all the underlying technology across their physical and virtual infrastructure is optimized. Learn more »

By Job Title

	IT Operations Manager Keeping the applications associated with your servers, network switches, and storage arrays up and running 24x7x365 with optimal performance remains the primary objective of the operations team. Additional responsibilities include maximizing the utilization of those IT assets and increasing the overall productivity of the IT operations staff. The trick is figuring out how to optimize current resources, both people and equipment, in a dynamic, virtualized environment while ensuring uptime and performance. Learn more »
	Storage Administrators/Manager Storage and SAN administrators face increasing pressure to bring new projects and applications online faster, to ensure their virtualized and cloud infrastructure performs as expected, and to guarantee nearly 100% data availability to the users. Though hard to achieve, big dividends are paid if problems can be anticipated and mitigated before they are reported by application users. Learn more »
	VMware Administrators VMware administrators are expected to ensure the performance and availability of virtualized and cloud-based applications. They are also tasked to drive increasing levels of server consolidation to lower the cost of computing. Isolated workload peaks can now cause resource conflicts, and the concentration of load can create new bottlenecks. Moving a workload without understanding load patterns can create resource conflicts. There is a critical need to have real-time I/O visibility into the virtualized infrastructure to meet this new wave of performance, utilization, and availability challenges. Learn more »
	CIO, VP of IT, or CTO Senior IT management needs the ability to measure the performance and utilization of the overall physical and virtual IT infrastructure. In order to control costs and optimize the infrastructure, comprehensive, vendor independent measurement solutions must be deployed into every business-critical data center. In addition, the risk to the business of outages and performance slowdowns must be proactively eliminated. Learn more »
	Level 3 Support Engineer If you work in the support organization at one of the leading server, switch, hypervisor, or storage suppliers, Virtual Instruments is your best friend. Our SOS-4-SANs emergency troubleshooting service and our SAN and Virtual Infrastructure Optimization service can uniquely help you resolve customer escalations that involve your toughest problems. If your customer has a critical SAN I/O problem, we can find the root-cause and work with you to resolve the problem quickly. Learn more »

Whitepapers

• Avoiding SAN Performance Problems | January 2011 | Maintaining peak performance while simultaneously addressing the root cause of SAN errors is challenging. This paper presents a high level summary of the most common SAN problems and explores new ways to dramatically improve application performance and availability. Datacenter

• Consolidation Best Practices Whitepaper | December 2010 | The benefits of storage consolidation are being realized by more and more companies and seen as a way to streamline many storage-driven applications. Virtual Instruments develops optimization solutions for managing the growth and design of storage and storage area network (SAN) -related technologies.

• Cloud Computing Performance Whitepaper | June 2010 | It's no secret that cloud computing is enabled by advancements in virtualization, and with all the benefits of virtualization come some challenges. There's a new class of tools out there designed to work with, and optimize the 'virtual infrastructure', the building block of cloud computing, and with those tools come some new IT best practices.

• Twelve Ways that Virtual Instruments Enhances your Existing Virtual Infrastructure and SAN Management Tools | January 2010 | The only hope of solving today's virtualized data center challenges is with better management tools. Today's most common solutions such as Enterprise Management Frameworks, Storage Resource Management, and specialized element managers all lack physical, real-time monitoring of the IO path. Virtual Infrastructure Optimization solutions, such as VirtualWisdom, are the only products that can non-intrusively optimize the performance of applications, including virtualized applications, in continuous real-time by measuring actual SAN I/O traffic data.

Product Datasheets

• VirtualWisdom Overview | VirtualWisdom provides comprehensive instrumentation and I/O measurement capabilities that reduce application response time, increase availability, and improve resource utilization. VirtualWisdom is the only product that can non-intrusively improve the performance of applications and increase the benefits of cloud-driven virtualization in real time by analyzing actual I/O traffic data.

• Virtual Server Probe | Virtual Server Probe collects information specifically about the utilization and performance of virtual machines within the VMware environment via the VMware vCenter server API. It is a virtual software probe that automatically discovers and monitors 80+ CPU, memory, network and disk I/O metrics for VMware ESX virtual machines, physical servers, and clusters. Actual measured data from VirtualWisdom enables IT managers to proactively balance the provisioning of applications on virtual machines for maximum application performance with the confidence that systems will not slow down or fail.

• SAN Availability Probe | As a component of the Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom solutions, the SAN Availability Probe is a non-agent based software probe that utilizes the MIB (management information block) from Fibre Channel switches via SNMP to gather switch performance and link error statistics in a non-intrusive manner. These critical switch statistics are collected by VirtualWisdom’s Server software and presented to the user in an easy to use configurable, graphical user interface.

• More Datasheets »

Technology Brief

• Technology Brief: UDCs for What-If Analysis | This Brief offers examples of how VirtualWisdom’s User Defined Contexts enable “what if” analysis, using existing metrics to help predict problems before they occur.

Analyst Reports

• APM Experts White Paper — Infrastructure Performance Management for Virtualized Systems | 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.

• Storage Switzerland White Paper — What is a Virtualization Performance Specialist? | 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.

• Storage Switzerland White Paper — Optimizing Storage I/O Latency to Maximize VMware Performance | 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.

• IT Brand Pulse White Paper — Virtual Instruments: Early Incumbents in the VIO Market | August 2010 | Privately held Virtual Instruments is a 2008 spin-out of Finisar Corporation that has established early incumbency in the nascent market for Virtual Infrastructure Optimization (VIO), the next big wave in management of information technology.

• Taneja Group White Paper — Optimizing the Virtual Infrastructure: Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom | 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.

Webinars

• Solving the SAN Storage/VMware Performance Puzzle — "Understanding the benefits of VMware's new Storage related features" | It’s falsely assumed that VMware is the source of many performance problems since it is relatively new in the datacenter. Others will claim it’s not VMware but the underlying storage. In this webinar Archie Hendryx, Senior Solutions Consultant for Virtual Instruments, addresses key issues and provides insight as to how a comprehensive view, from the VM to the LUN, is imperative for further consolidation and safe Physical to Virtual migrations of your Tier 1 applications.

• Best Practices for Private Cloud Migration: Reduce Storage Migration Risks — "Learn the 5 critical areas to watch before, during, and after your migration" | SANpulse and Virtual Instruments have teamed together to offer some practical advice on how to reduce storage migration risks and pave the way for moving to the private cloud. In this 45 minute discussion, we will describe specific ways to measure your infrastructure readiness before, during, and after your migration. Join Marie-Pierre Belanger, VP of Product Management at SANpulse and Jim Bahn, Director of Product Marketing at Virtual Instruments as they identify the key metrics to ensure the performance and availability SLAs required by your businesses units while efficiently managing investments and resources. With this essential data, you can create and maintain the SLAs that everyone can get behind.

• Your Fibre Channel SAN: Are you making the most of it? — "Disproving the myths around Fibre Channel SANs"  | There is a common myth that Fibre Channel SANs are expensive, difficult to manage and hard to troubleshoot.  There is also substantial marketing by certain vendors proclaiming the benefits of alternative solutions. But what if FC SANs were actually less expensive and easier to operate than alternatives? Join Stephen Spellicy, Director of Marketing for Virtensys and Archie Hendryx, Solutions Consultant for Virtual Instruments as they break the myth and demonstrate how there is indeed a clear path to optimizing your current FC SAN storage infrastructure. Don't miss this informative, on-demand webinar.

• The New Best Practices of SAN TAPs — "Reduce Troubleshooting from Days to Minutes"  | In this webinar, you will learn how deploying Traffic Access Points can enable complex IT environments to reduce their SAN troubleshooting times from days to minutes.

• Solving the SAN Storage/VMware Performance Puzzle — "Understanding the benefits of VMware's new Storage related features"  | It’s falsely assumed that VMware is the source of many performance problems since it is relatively new in the datacenter. Others will claim it’s not VMware but the underlying storage. In this webinar Archie Hendryx, Senior Solutions Consultant for Virtual Instruments, addresses key issues and provides insight as to how a comprehensive view, from the VM to the LUN, is imperative for further consolidation and safe Physical to Virtual migrations of your Tier 1 applications.

• The Top Ten Secrets to Avoiding SAN Performance Problems — "Why your Storage isn't always to blame" | Maintaining peak performance while simultaneously addressing the root cause of SAN errors is challenging. In this webinar, Archie Hendryx, Senior Solutions Consultant for Virtual Instruments, discusses the most common SAN problems and explores new ways to dramatically improve application performance and availability.

Videos and Podcasts

• How to Load Balance between Virtual Machines | This four-minute video demonstrates how virtualization administrators can more confidently provision higher-value applications to virtualized systems, or they can achieve significantly higher consolidation ratios by removing underutilized ESX/ESXi servers from clusters and optimally balancing VMs across servers based on all dimensions of performance (CPU, memory, I/O).