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Prevent SAN Performance Problems

Prevent SAN Performance Problems — Increase Infrastructure Availability

SAN performance monitoring and effective SAN troubleshooting are key to avoiding application slowdowns and outages. Most mission critical applications are I/O-intensive. For example, the key to improving Oracle and SAP application performance often means optimizing your storage infrastructure. Nearly all SAN management products are focused on storage capacity optimization, but capacity cannot be expanded without a comprehensive view of how it affects performance and end-user response time.

At best, the infrastructure management product you are probably using today reports IOPS or MB/s, which are only high-level measures of performance.  If you care about application performance, you must measure infrastructure performance by how it effects application response time for every transaction. Looking at SAN performance through IOPS or MB/s is like looking at an automobile speedometer, and guessing how long it takes to go to the market for a loaf of bread.  And with the tools you’re probably using, it’s even worse than that. Extending the analogy, most other performance tools look at a number of trips to the market and tell you what your average speed was, and they won’t tell you if one of the trips took 50% longer than the others, or if one of the trips resulted in a crash. Using VirtualWisdom to look at application latency is like having a stopwatch and reporting on exactly how long each trip takes to get to the market and return with that bread. And with a real-time latency measurement, you would know, instantaneously, if one of those trips is taking 50% longer than normal.

VirtualWisdom is the only solution that directly measures the I/O performance effect (latency, bandwidth, re-tries, errors, etc) on the infrastructure of capacity additions, configuration changes, component/device changes, or application changes. With this new information, your team can immediately identify and proactively resolve performance problems, improving overall application response times and end-user customer satisfaction.

Whitepapers

  • Ensuring Performance & Availability of VCE Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform Series 700  |  
    March 2012  |       VCE Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms lack comprehensive end-to-end real-time monitoring that ensures the performance and availability of the infrastructure that supports your business-critical applications. VirtualWisdom enables IT managers to realize the full benefits of Vblock Infrastructure Platforms.

  • Avoiding Brocade Fabric Performance Problems | November 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.

  • 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.

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Analyst Reports

  • 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.

  • 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.

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Webinars

  • 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 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.

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Videos & Podcasts