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Webinars and Podcasts

The Webinars below provide information on Virtual Instruments' products and SAN and virtualization best practices.

Upcoming Webinar

vSphere 6.0

Date: Wednesday, February 23, 2012
Time: 9:00 am PT | 12:00 pm ET | 5:00 pm GMT

Webinars On Demand

  • Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) — Ensuring Successful Consolidation & Private Cloud Migrations by Utilizing Your Real-Time Server-SAN Data 

    One of the biggest challenges when planning a server/storage consolidation is ensuring the applications and the Server-SAN infrastructure can meet the required performance and availability service level agreements (SLAs). The challenge is that most agencies don’t really know the true utilization of their current environment to accurately account for and plan a consolidated environment. In this on-demand webinar, Carahsoft, Doug Norton, Director of Virtual Instruments Federal and Bob Gourley editor of CTOvision.com and founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Crucial Point LLC, discusses how to plan and model a consolidated infrastructure to safely deliver upon OMB's required FDCCI and the next logical extension to a private cloud environment.

  • De-risk Deploying Business Critical Applications in Your Private Cloud — "How to Ensure Performance and Availability in a Shared Virtual Infrastructure"

    As Global 2000 IT organizations start deploying and preparing to migrate to a private cloud environment, they need to architect their private clouds to ensure that application requirements for performance and availability are achieved with minimal risk to the business. In this on-demand webinar, Jim Bahn, Director of Product Marketing at Virtual Instruments, will discuss new industry best practices and suggest a clear approach to de-risking your virtual and physical infrastructure before you move mission-critical applications to production in your private cloud.

  • SAN Management Best Practices —"A New Approach for Controlling Cost & Reducing Risk"

    Virtual Instruments recognizes that SAN monitoring and management tools are only part of the story in achieving a fully optimized SAN environment where performance, utilization and availability are maximized. To reach these goals in the most cost-effective way, Virtual Instruments and Enterprise Strategy Group have developed a SAN Maturity Model that gives enterprises a framework to assess Maturity Levels, Key Process Areas (KPAs), Goals (KPIs), and Leading Practices.

  • 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. Also In German

  • SAP Deployments: Reducing Risk and Guaranteeing Performance in Open Systems

    SAP has become vital to the Global 2000, whether you use SAP to run your supply chain, manufacturing, CRM, or Business Intelligence. How SAP performs in your open systems platform is critical to the efficiency and success of the business. Learn how to understanding the optimal SAP infrastructure and the key benefits of deploying SAP with Virtual Instruments. (the on-demand is currently unavailable.)

 

Podcasts

Video Highlights

Gartner Webinar: De-risking Applications in Your Virtualized Infrastructure

De-risking critical applications, especially in a virtualized data center, is now a top priority for most enterprise IT departments. So how do you ensure performance and uptime while increasing the use of new, faster technologies, together with server and storage virtualization?  In this webcast, Gartner storage management expert Valdis Filks and Virtual Instruments’ Vice President of Solutions Consulting, John Gentry, discuss how real-time I/O monitoring solutions are required to guarantee application performance and availability SLAs.

 

 

Storage Switzerland Video: Analyst George Crump on the Challenges of Managing a Private Cloud

George discusses the critical need for real-time infrastructure monitoring for IT managers architecting and deploying private clouds. Data centers with private clouds have new challenges that need to be understood before deployment.

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YouTube Videos

 

 

Full Presentation

Maximizing Performance, Utilization, & Availability with VirtualWisdom®

This series of short videos introduces the VirtualWIsdom product and describe how it solves critical IT problems.

 
 

Individual VirtualWisdom Demonstration Videos

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Video Series

  • Identify Over-Provisioned SAN Links | In this video, learn how to identify overprovisioned SAN links and optimize storage tiering.

  • Optimize Storage Tiering |  In this video, we will show how Customers use VirtualWisdom to help increase their use of Tier 2 storage, saving typically over $5k per TB, and maintaining performance SLAs on business-critical applications.

  • Troubleshoot - Reduce Time to Resolutions | Learn how Customers use VIrtualWisdom to troubleshoot their SAN and dramatically reduce their time to problem resolution.

  • Reduce Downtime | Learn how Customers use VirtualWisdom to help reduce downtime and simultaneoulsy reduce the actual number of trouble tickets filed.

  • Avoid Performance Problems | Learn how Customers use VirtualWisdom to avoid performance problems by optimizing their HBA queue depths.

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.

  • VirtualWisdom Overview for VP Level Managers | VirtualWisdom products and services provide comprehensive, real-time instrumentation and measurement that allows IT managers to optimize the performance, utilization, and availability of their SAN and virtualized IT infrastructure, especially those deployed in private cloud environments. VirtualWisdom provides the performance visibility and confidence to fully deploy VMware virtualization for mission-critical applications, driving up consolidation ratios and drastically reducing the effort required to troubleshoot and optimize SANs.

  • VirtualWisdom Jumpstart Kit | The Jumpstart Kit is designed to provide all of the features and benefits of VirtualWisdom and SANInsight-based instrumentation, monitoring, and measurement in an entry-level, standard deployment configuration. It enables software monitoring of up to 192 switch ports, and 24 storage ports at a 12:1 roving ratio.

VirtualWisdom® Software

  • VirtualWisdom 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.

  • VirtualWisdom 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.

VirtualWisdom Hardware

  • VirtualWisdom SAN Performance Probe | The Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom SAN Performance Probe analyzes every packet on a fibre channel SAN. A SAN Performance Probe can be dedicated to a single SAN link or, using a SANInsight Rover, can rove among many SAN links to provide statistics about storage I/O traffic as it relates to an application server, storage subsystem, remote replication, virtualization or other key SAN device or application.

SANInsight® Hardware

  • SANInsight Fibre TAP Patch Panel System | Virtual Instrument’s new SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System provides a range of options for integrating the unique, patented technology into patch panels. By unifying TAP and patch functions into a single layer of physical infrastructure, SANInsight significantly reduces the cost, complexity, and infrastructure impact of TAP deployment. SANInsight facilitates the broad installation of TAPs into both new and existing physical infrastructures, fully addressing the best practices monitorability requirement and enabling complete SAN optimization.

  • SANInsight Enterprise Rover | The Virtual Instruments’ SANInsight Rover provides advanced capabilities to VirtualWisdom® by maximizing the number of SAN links monitored by a SAN Performance Probe. The Rover extends the reach of VirtualWisdom in large enterprise SANs and lowers the cost of SAN monitoring and analysis.

  • SANInsight Mobile Monitoring Option | As a member of the Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom solutions family, the Mobile Monitoring Option (MMO) is designed to provide all of the features and benefits of VirtualWisdom-based instrumentation, monitoring, and measurement in a purpose-built, mobile cabinet, designed to house SANInsightTM Fibre Channel monitoring equipment. Use of the MMO enables IT staff to easily and quickly deploy an infrastructure optimizing VirtualWisdom solution anywhere in the datacenter.

  • SANInsight Protocol Analyzer | The Virtual Instruments SANInsight Protocol Analyzer is a critical tool for IT personnel to troubleshoot component and systems utilizing the Fibre Channel protocol. It captures traffic and graphically reports performance metrics and data errors in real time whenever there is live Fibre Channel traffic over any monitored link. In addition, users can view MB/s, Kframes/sec, utilization, frame errors, and physical layer errors from each direction of the link.

  • Performance Assessment Kit (PAK) | The Virtual Instruments portable Performance Assessment Kit (PAK) is an integrated mobile unit that includes everything required to identify the root causes of Storage Area Network (SAN) performance and availability problems. The mobile unit can be easily moved between data centers due to its rugged, integrated design.

Other Datasheets

  • Corporate Profile | Virtual Instruments is the leader in instrumentation, measurement, and monitoring solutions that allow enterprises to optimize the performance, availability, and utilization of Storage Area Networks (SANs) and virtualized IT infrastructure. Virtual Instruments helps IT organizations maximize their use of existing assets through detailed measurements of performance and utilization – enabling your organization to “do more with less”.

  • VMware & Virtual Instruments Partnership | VirtualWisdom enables the IT Manager to have complete confidence to deploy I/O intensive business-critical applications on vSphere. Due to its unique cross-domain realtime monitoring capabilities, VirtualWisdom can feed essential performance and utilization data back into vCenter to trigger a vMotion transfer and re-balance the virtualmachines across the server cluster. This results in significantly improved virtualized application performance, substantially increased server and SAN utilization, and higher overall availability.

  • RemoteWisdom Access Platform | As a member of the Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom solutions family, RemoteWisdom Access Platform 1.0 is designed to provide enhanced support of VirtualWisdom 2.1 and later installations.

 

Service Datasheets

  • SAN Healthcheck and Scan Service | By looking deep into the SAN infrastructure physical layer, Virtual Instruments’ SAN HealthCheck and Performance Scan Service, can quickly identify performance and behavior anomalies and trouble spots on any SAN. The service scans all levels of connectivity to identify potential communication issues on the Fibre Channel network and points out potential issues that are on the verge of or have exceeded the “Fibre Channel rules of thumb” SAN infrastructure behavior. A comprehensive report of analysis and findings is provided at the conclusion of the service. The customer may then choose to request additional services to provide detailed capacity planning or to assist in the resolution of issues found during the SAN HealthCheck and Performance Scan Service.

  • Virtual Infrastructure Healthcheck and Scan | The Virtual Infrastructure HealthCheck and Performance Scan Service is designed for customers who have deployed virtualized infrastructure and need visibility into how the SAN I/O infrastructure affects the performance of applications deployed on VMs.

  • SOS-4-SANs Emergency SAN Troubleshooting | The Virtual Instruments SOS-4-SANs Service is designed to offer immediate expert assistance to end-users, integrators, and SAN component vendors who require deep expertise in troubleshooting SAN problems. By utilizing the VirtualWisdom® and SANInsight™ monitoring and analysis products, Virtual Instruments is unique in its ability to identify and resolve Fibre Channel (FC) SAN emergencies to bring mission-critical applications rapidly back to optimal performance.

  • QuickStart Services for VirtualWisdom | VirtualWisdom QuickStart Services are designed to jumpstart the deployment of Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom software and associated SANInsight™ hardware products such as Traffic Access Points (TAPs), SAN Monitoring Probes (SAN Performance Probe), Rovers, and Protocol Analyzers. These services combine on-site training and deployment services to help ensure a successful initial VirtualWisdom deployment.

  • Expert Services | Virtual Instruments’ Expert Services provide ongoing, post-installation services designed to ensure that customers maximize the value of their VirtualWisdom implementations. These services provide custom assistance; both remote and onsite, to ensure IT staff are realizing the value of the VirtualWisdom solution, that it is tailored to their operational needs and driving business impact.

  • Maintenance and Support Services | The Virtual Instruments support team is dedicated to providing all of our customers with the enterprise class services and support required to manage and maintain their Virtual Instruments monitoring solution for mission-critical SAN infrastructures. Our support services provide customers with easy and reliable 24/7 access to our support center, online resources and corrective maintenance services.

Virtual Instruments Whitepapers

  • Cloud Computing Performance Whitepaper | January 2012 | 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.

  • De-risking Private Cloud Deployments Technical Brief | September 2011 | Compared with a "traditional" data center, private cloud environments frequently have more users, more applications, more data, and typically, a tighter set of operating standards to meet. Virtual Instruments can provide the ideal performance and availability optimization solution for your virtualized mission-critical applications deployed on your most advanced private cloud infrastructures.

  • Eliminating VMware / Storage Related Performance Challenges with VirtualWisdom | August 2011 | This document addresses specifically how to proactively deal with the performance and troubleshooting related issues found in a Fibre Channel SAN / vSphere environment. Using Virtual Instruments’ revolutionary platform, VirtualWisdom, this document showcases the need for a comprehensive and real-time view to proactively deal with performance issues in a virtual server and SAN environment.

  • Financial Benefits of VirtualWisdom | September 2011 | The purpose of this document is to help provide guidelines for estimating the Return on Investment for deploying Virtual Instruments. The primary economic benefits of VirtualWisdom come from four areas: Reduced Downtime, Faster Resolution of Trouble tickets, Deferred or Eliminated Purchases of SAN Links, and Storage Re-tiering. We discuss the definitions and how to calculate the financial benefits of each of these.

  • Destroying the Myths of Fibre Channel | May 2011 | There are common myths amongst the storage network community that Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (FC SAN) are expensive and hard to manage and troubleshoot. This white paper sets out to address the reasons behind these myths and demonstrates how FC SAN is not only a high performance connectivity infrastructure but is also highly reliable, secure and scalable. It explains that many of the “problems” associated with FC SAN are, in reality, a result of poor resource utilization, lack of insight and “business as usual” working practices.

  • Top 7 Business Reasons for Tapping Your Fibre Channel SAN | February 2011 | Physical layer monitoring is the real-time acquisition of error, performance, and utilization data via Traffic Access Points, or TAPs. Monitoring ensures the accuracy of the changes and validates that they produce only the desired results. Physical layers that address both requirements enable the Fibre Channel SANs operating on top of them to be iteratively optimized for maximum availability, performance, and utilization.

  • Avoiding SAN Performance Problems | September 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 | November 2011 | 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.

  • Twelve Ways that Virtual Instruments Enhances your Existing Virtual Infrastructure and SAN Management Tools | September 2011 | 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.

  • Optical Taps for the Enterprise | September 2011 | A Traffic Analysis Point or Traffic Access Port (TAP) is a hardware device that provides access to traffic flowing on a physical connection (link) between two or more points within a network. This paper discusses one of the simplest, most effective, and most cost efficient ways to gain access to the data within switched networks—the Traffic Access Port (TAP).

  • How Virtual Instruments Optimizes Storage Tiering | September 2011 | This paper describes how Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom complements and adds critical intelligence to storage vendor tools, to significantly improve your re-tiering decisions and accelerate your realization of lower storage costs.

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Technology Briefs

  • Technology Brief: Storage Network Utilization Best Practices | September 2011 | In most corporate data centers, 2Gbps and 4Gbps Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs) links are over-provisioned in an attempt to avoid performance issues, to maximize availability, and to simply avoid risk. This is due to a lack of visibility into actual SAN performance and utilization data. This technical brief discusses how a VirtualWisdom solution enables IT to optimize existing SAN infrastructure so it can provide consistent performance and reliability, and it provides best practices guidelines for moving to an 8Gbps infrastructure.

  • Technology Brief: UDCs for What-If Analysis | April 2011 | Most SAN management monitoring solutions are designed around troubleshooting, providing reactive assistance to harried IT administrators and operations professionals. Given the size and complexity of many environments, this simply isn't sufficient to avoid inevitable application slowdowns or outages. The UDC (User Defined Contexts ) feature enables creation of 'custom context', specified by user-defined Group-By fields and values, customizing the data that VirtualWisdom stores by augmenting it with information specific to a specific SAN.

  • Technology Brief: Slow Draining Devices | September 2011 | Slow draining devices are devices that are requesting more information than they can consume. It can exist at any link utilization level where achieved throughput into the slow draining port is lower compared to the intended throughput. This can be because they are running at a slower link rate than the rest of the environment, or could just mean that other factors within the devices are preventing them from functioning as fast as they could. With VirtualWisdom, one can identify if a slowdown is caused by a server side (slow draining) device, the storage side, or other issue.

  • Technology Brief: Best Practices for Transitioning your FC SAN Infrastructure to 8G | September 2011 | With the introduction of 8 Gbit/sec switches, HBAs, and storage systems, it is now possible to integrate 8 Gbit/sec functionality that extends from the fabric all the way to the server platform. This paper discusses some of the considerations around 8Gbit/sec deployments, offers best practices for ensuring a smooth transition and suggests a compelling case for extending the life of existing 2Gbs and 4Gbps fabrics.

  • Technology Brief: Optimizing an IBM AIX VIO Server with LPARS in a Fibre Channel SAN with VirtualWisdom | September 2011 | VirtualWisdom is an innovative solution that helps IT organizations realize the full economic benefits of networked storage and server virtualization, including environments running IBM’s AIX with VIO and LPARs.

Industry Analyst Reports

  • Cloud Environments Have Familiar Storage Challenges – Just More of Them  | Storage Switzerland | November 2011 |  This report describes the storage challenges related to implementing private cloud environments.   Cloud environments have many storage challenges that are familiar to data center managers, but due to their density and abstraction, the issues become more complex and can impact a business more severely.  Read on to learn some best practices to overcome these more intense challenges.

  • 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.

  • Product Review:  Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom: A Big Window into SAN Performance, Availability and Utilization: | Enterprise Strategy Group | September 2011 |  This ESG Lab Validation report examines VirtualWisdom and validates its capabilities to provide real-time, granular visibility of FC SAN traffic from virtual servers to the storage within the data center.

  • Product Review:  VirtualWisdom 3.0 & SAN Performance Probe | Storage Switzerland | September 2011 | . This paper reviews the key product features of the new VirtualWisdom 3.0 solution, including the SAN Performance ProbeFC8 and explains their impact on the modern data center.

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

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

  • What Your SRM Tool Isn't Telling You | Storage Switzerland White Paper | September, 2010 | 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.

  • Virtual Instruments: Early Incumbents in the VIO Market | IT Brand Pulse White Paper | August 19, 2010 | 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.

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

  •  Reducing the Risk of Upgrading to 8Gbit FC | Storage Switzerland White Paper | 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.

  • Building the Data Center for Infrastructure Visibility | Taneja Group White Paper | April 2010 | Today, when we bring up the topic of "visibility" within the mission critical networks of the enterprise, most organizations turn immediately to their practices with sniffers, traffic analyzers, and trending tools – more often than not focused purely on their IP-based communication networks. But these tools can turn into nothing more than a temporary placebo when fighting performance problems, and trying to gain visibility into the infrastructure for more strategic management.

  • Maximizing Tiered Stored ROI: Performance-Based Storage Tiering | Storage Switzerland White Paper | April 2010 | Costs of high performance, fibre channel SAN infrastructures can be significant and storage tiering is often employed as a strategy to control those costs. However, most tiering methodologies simply prioritize groups of data based on access patterns and assume that the highest tier data should be stored on the fastest storage arrays.

  • Virtual Instruments Customer Benefits Field Study | Taneja Group White Paper | March 2010 | Taneja Group conducted in-depth telephone interviews with a set of Virtual Instruments (VI) customers, of varying sizes and across several industry verticals, over a five-month period in late 2009 and early 2010.

  • 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.

  • Forcing the SAN to Grow Up | Enterprise Strategy Group White Paper | October 2009 | 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—throw hardware at the problem—was normally taken, resulting in a SAN that usually worked well; except, when it didn't, often with catastrophic consequences! Virtual Instruments, a private equity-backed spin-off from Finisar (a leading vendor in Fiber Optic Network Test Systems), has the solution: providing SAN managers much-needed LAN-style monitoring capabilities.

  • What is Virtual Infrastructure Optimization? | Taneja Group White Paper | February 2009 | 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.

  • Enabling Efficient SAN Performance Management | IDC White Paper | January 2009 | This document explores the role Virtual Instruments' NetWisdom Enterprise monitoring and analysis technology plays in reducing the cost and complexity of managing the datacenter cloud — and the large heterogeneous and virtualized infrastructure within it. In an effort to assess the real day-to-day pain points and operating requirements of today's datacenters, IDC conducted interviews with senior storage executives at several enterprise organizations. This white paper presents real customer scenarios demonstrating the benefits these enterprises have gained in deploying and utilizing these tools

  • NetWisdom SAN I/O Intelligence | Butler Group Technology Audit | January 2009 | Large organisations are increasingly dependent on complex Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructures for the delivery of business-critical applications and data. SANs are major corporate investments and availability issues can ultimately place a business at risk. Virtual Instruments' NetWisdom solution is a Fibre Channel performance monitoring tool for SANs that helps organisations to simplify SAN administration and ensure that SAN performance and availability are optimised. Through its real-time dashboards, trigger-based alerts, and analytics facilities SAN administrators can proactively address (or prevent) SAN performance and availability issues, provide metrics to demonstrate critical application service level compliance, and optimise existing SAN infrastructure rather than 'blindly' adding new components. Unlike traditional Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools that interrogate components, NetWisdom provides visibility into SAN traffic flows and, importantly, actual performance and utilisation.