VirtualInstruments

Why Virtual Instruments for Online Trading and Gaming

For companies specializing in financial trading and online gaming, performance and availability of their IT infrastructure is paramount.  The business applications that support these organizations simply can’t go down or experience any noticeable slowdowns.  The revenue impact can be enormous.  During trading hours and major events such as lottery draws, performance is vital. Until now performance assurance has been achieved primarily by overprovisioning the infrastructure to ensure capacity and throughput is well within the tolerances of the servers, switches and storage devices.

Typically, this over-provisioning results in significant wasted funds as average utilizations can be well under 20%.  Unfortunately, this approach is no longer cost effective as unjustified upgrades, capacity additions, floor space, cooling, etc. all demand substantial budget. VirtualWisdom^® from Virtual Instruments can help.  VirtualWisdom monitors the entire SAN I/O infrastructure regardless of vendor to give you an accurate view of performance, availability and utilization of your key IT infrastructure.  It provides a real time end-to-end view and comprehensive historical reporting via an easy to deploy, agentless monitoring solution.

Virtual Instruments knows that every millisecond counts in on-line trading environments.

The SAN, where critical applications reside, is the last black hole in the infrastructure. Traditional element tools show you how individual components are performing, but they don’t give the whole end-to-end view. Traditional monitoring and virtualization performance tools average their results over time, typically five to fifteen minutes, which does not give a meaningful view to the peaks and troughs of transaction performance. A five minute poll can be wildly inaccurate, preventing you from seeing significant infrastructure anomalies.  Real-time performance metrics can mean the difference between an order going through rather than losing a transaction. Every day customers are lost, maybe never to return, due to inaccurate performance reporting.

VirtualWisdom lets you monitor your infrastructure in real time, to the millisecond, to ensure applications are performing as they should and the infrastructure is running at its optimum performance. It can also be used to baseline application performance, model changes, and monitor disruptive migrations and consolidations. VirtualWisdom gives you all the information you need in an easy to understand format. Views of the infrastructure can be customized by application, platform or requirement of a manager or administrator. It also works with your existing APM and enterprise management framework tools to enhance their capability. 

Why on-line trading organizations use VirtualWisdom®

• Guarantees millisecond response times
• Assures pre-trading baseline and performance validation
• Supports compliance reports confirming SLA’s are met
• Accelerates roll-out of new applications
• Complements Application Performance Management tools
• Models infrastructure peak loading
• Ensures database changes will not impact performance

Global 500 organizations rely on VirtualWisdom to tune their critical application infrastructure, saving CAPEX and OPEX, reducing trouble tickets and ensuring performance and availability.

“There was no real alternative for us. Storage vendors offer tools which are designed mainly to check their own systems but not for monitoring the entire SAN. It was important for us to get vendor-agnostic performance analyses on a LUN basis. In that degree of detail, this requirement could only be met by Virtual Instruments.” 
Erich Eckel, Manager IT, Austrian Lottery Association

To find out how the Austrian Lottery improved its IT resources by implementing VirtualWisdom click here.

To learn how Virtual Instruments can help you increase your competitive edge in an on-line trading environment, contact us today.