By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer Last month, the Virtual Instruments team made our way to sunny San Diego for one of the biggest shows of the year, HitachiNEXT 2018. We had an extremely constructive time meeting with partners and customers, offering live demos of our products, and discussing how enterprise IT teams can build… Read More »
By Jaymin Patel, VP of Product Ecosystem Development Last week we announced the launch of the Virtual Instruments Technology Alliance Program, an initiative that not only extends our rapidly expanding collaborative global ecosystem, but also offers participating companies the opportunity to test and validate the integration of their offerings with Virtual Instruments’ products. This is… Read More »
Part 4 in a 4-part series By Ravi Prakash, Director Product Marketing Value of cross domain correlation of issues using custom built analytics When an infrastructure alarm goes off, your operations team would like to get to root cause and identify the culprit responsible as soon as possible. What if the culprit is a device… Read More »
Part 3 in a 4-part series By Ravi Prakash, Director Product Marketing Value of an agentless approach to compute infrastructure In a virtualized compute environment, you have the issue of noisy neighbors – a VM from a less mission critical tier vying for resources with a VM associated with a more critical tier 0 application. … Read More »
Part 2 in a 4-part series By Ravi Prakash, Director Product Marketing Application latency in a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) environment If your virtualized applications running on Cisco UCS servers experience slowness, this could be caused by throughput issues in the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) portion of your network between the host and… Read More »
Part 1 in a 4-part series By Ravi Prakash, Director Product Marketing Do your application users complain of sporadic slowness but the vendors in your IT war room claim that their infrastructure products are not at fault? As the owner of all infrastructure you are on the hook to resolve slowness in business-critical applications. Despite… Read More »
By Sheen Khoury, EVP of Global Sales Last week we announced an innovative partnership with enterprise technology distributor NEXTGEN to provide app-centric infrastructure performance management solutions to enterprises in Australia and New Zealand. The partnership allows NEXTGEN to offer their customers superior end-to-end performance monitoring and analytics for private and hybrid cloud infrastructure through their… Read More »
An extended version of this blog post originally published on Forbes.com – read the original article here. As CTO of Virtual Instruments, I am responsible for bringing Virtual Instruments’ technology vision to the market, as well as being the voice of our customers in driving our product strategy. Some of the most common complaints I… Read More »
Come see us LIVE! September 25-27 At HitachiNext 2018. The Virtual Instruments Booth is located: Second Floor (Indigo Level), Indigo Ballroom, Section E Virtual Instruments has a long and valued relationship with Hitachi Vantara. We have worked together to solve many challenging problems across a global variety of enterprise customers. From winning large telco estates… Read More »
By Philippe Vincent, CEO An extended version of this blog post originally published on InformationWeek – read the original article here. It’s official: when it comes to customer relations, the days of relying solely on salespeople and evangelists to build trust with your customers are long gone. In my time as a senior executive, as… Read More »
By Louise Dilley, Regional Services Director, Virtual Instruments Cloud migration is a strategic necessity in Enterprise organizations – but do those of us who support and innovate in the on-premise space have the tools and skills that a smooth transition from on-premise to cloud demands? Gartner’s infrastructure team MVP, David J. Cappuccio, recently stated that… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Marketing Organizations across industries rely on their ability to dynamically scale – even smaller companies require a level of scalability that was once only expected of Fortune 500 enterprises. As customers continue to demand optimal performance at all times, organizations in retail, ecommerce, finance, healthcare and other industries rely… Read More »
By Tim Van Ash, SVP of products Recently, we announced an innovative partnership with industry pioneer SANBlaze to provide unprecendented insight into FC-NVMe workloads for storage technology vendors and enterprise IT. The partnership not only features a joint reselling agreement, but also includes cross integrations between our WorkloadWisdom solution and SANBlaze’s VirtuaLUN offering. Our respective… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Recently, the Virtual Instruments team made our way up from the South Bay to San Francisco to meet with some leading IT exectuives at Morton’s steakhouse, and over prime rib and classic cocktails we discussed some of the most pressing issues we’re hearing from our customers when it comes to their… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager With crude oil prices reaching $75 a barrel in July 2018, an indicator of future output is the number of active US rigs drilling for oil and this number rose to 863. [1] If you manage datacenter infrastructure for a company focused on oil & gas exploration, you may be… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO This blog originally published on APMdigest – read the original here. Most enterprises lack the complete visibility required to avoid business-impacting application outages and slowdowns – resulting in nearly 90 percent of enterprises being unable to consistently meet service level agreements (SLAs) for their business-critical applications, according to a recent survey… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO It’s a momentous month here at Virtual Instruments – we’re celebrating our 10th birthday! And much like the posts from your Facebook friends about their kids turning 10, it’s hard to believe how quickly we’ve grown up – so let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane… Virtual Instruments was founded… Read More »
Daniel Ninow, Solutions Consultant It’s well known that within large IT datacenters, specialists in different domains (i.e. application, DB, networking, storage, etc) often struggle with sharing tools to solve problems. Vendors produce tools that may give a deep view of one domain, but lack correlation with others. A national medical practice and research foundation customer,… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Enterprises today face quite the quandary: to stay competitive, they’re under tremendous pressure to move apps and workloads to the cloud – but rushing the job could have disastrous consequences for the business. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place… To help enterprises overcome this predicament, last… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Marketing Last month, Virtual Instruments was named one of the Top Workplaces in 2018 by Bay Area News Group – the largest newspaper publisher in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, whose publications include the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times. This award is hugely meaningful… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Sr Director of Marketing Last month, the Virtual Instruments team made our way to sunny Orlando for one of our biggest shows of the year, Cisco Live. We spent a highly productive week meeting with partners and customers, offering live demos of our products, and discussing how enterprise IT teams can build… Read More »
By Lennart Neumann, Business Development EMEA On the 5th and 6th of June, Virtual Instruments attended the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit in Frankfurt. What is great about this event, apart from speaking to over one hundred IT infrastructure decision makers, is the fact that all the companies attending are in the process of… Read More »
By Rick Haggart, Senior VP Professional Services You’ve been asked to migrate your existing apps to the cloud. But you’ve got happy users; users who expect a certain level of app availability and performance. Your current staff may not have a lot of experience with running in the cloud, and there are a lot of… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We’re thrilled to share that Virtual Instruments has won the 2018 Storage Awards’ Monitoring & Reporting Vendor of the Year award – for the second year in a row! Presented by the U.K.’s highly influential Storage Magazine and nicknamed ‘The Storries XV,’ the awards recognize vendors, teams and individuals advancing innovation… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer, Virtual Instruments The World Cup is here and people around the globe are getting swept up in the excitement, predicting results and gluing themselves to TV screens in homes, offices, and bars. While the World Cup offers a welcome excuse for employees to take a break from the daily… Read More »
By Brett Lightfoot, Regional Director, APAC In the high-tech world of monitoring supercars, I am sure many people have heard of the “most expensive car crash” where eight Ferraris, one Lamborghini Diablo, a Nissan GT-R Skyline, three Mercedes Benzes, and one Toyota Prius, were involved in a 14-car pile up in Japan. Just the repair… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer Virtual Instruments At Virtual Instruments, we make a concerted effort to keep a close eye on the innovation and research taking place in the IT operations sector. Maybe to no one’s surprise, Gartner is one of the leading advisors when it comes to this industry, and we take every… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager In 2015 the Smithsonian featured an article on climate change and its impact on bees. According to this article, global warming is causing the southern limits of the North American and European bumble bee species to move north by up to 300 kmbut the northern limits of the bee ranges… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager When you use services like Google Maps you can see a high-level view but then drill down to topics of interest, you can overlay satellite imagery, street maps, 360-degree panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic congestion and you can plan your travel by car, on foot or via public transportation. … Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager As an IT executive in manufacturing, you may be asked to produce KPIs, so managers may improve supply chain coordination, improve facilities and equipment maintenance and analyze manufacturing buffer incursions when projects exceed allotted times. Alternately you could be an IT executive in an electric utility tasked with reducing the… Read More »
Len Rosenthal, CMO Earlier this spring, the Virtual Instruments team headed out to Vegas (yes, again) for one of the most important technology conferences for our company. Dell Technologies World offers us the opportunity to demonstrate our industry-leading technology to the engineers, architects, and operators at the forefront of innovation for the IT infrastructure stack and… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager Imagine that it is Friday evening and a crowd is gathering outside a bar in Manhattan. To ensure that all patrons feel comfortable the bar would like to keep the ratio of guests at 50% female to 50% male. When any guests leave the bar, the bouncer must ensure that… Read More »
Sean O’Donnell, Managing Director, EMEA Wednesday 9th May Virtual Instruments and Arrow ECS formally launched their new EMEA distribution agreement at Rules, London’s oldest Restaurant. Sean O’Donnell and Nick Coleman from Virtual Instruments and Anthony Dobson and Tabitha Collier from Arrow ECS hosted the event. Multiple UK reseller partners heard how hundreds of Virtual Instruments customers… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager As an IT executive in an electric utility, you live in an ever-changing world. Electricity storage via Li-Ion batteries made available to corporations on a storage-as-a-service model means that companies like Whole Foods in California may opt to use energy storage and avoid paying a premium for energy usage at… Read More »
By John Gentry, Chief Technology Officer, Virtual Instruments Let me begin by saying that I am honored to have been invited to be a part of such a prestigious and unique forum for discussing major trends in technology and their impact on business and society in general. I am also excited to share learnings and… Read More »
By Sean O’Donnell, EMEA Managing Director, Virtual Instruments In case you haven’t noticed, we here at Virtual Instruments have become quite the webinar veterans. We recently conducted an enlightening session with independent analyst firm Bloor Research, in which we discussed the instrumentation of the virtualized data center to enable performance SLAs. Titled “Overcoming the ‘Not… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing, Virtual Instruments It’s the middle of April, which means that one of Virtual Instruments’ most important events is coming up in just a few short weeks. Dell Technologies World, taking place April 30-May 3 at the Venetian in Las Vegas, is the leading technology conference… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Last October we announced a game-changing partnership with Cisco to dramatically simplify and lower the cost of storage network performance monitoring, and today we’ve taken the partnership a step further with the release of the latest version of our App-centric Infrastructure Performance Management platform, VirtualWisdom 5.6. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the most notable… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager As a healthcare CIO mandated with the transition to electronic healthcare records, you’ve done your due diligence, evaluated various EHR vendors and most likely settled on Epic, a software vendor with over 25% of the US acute care hospital market share. You’ve followed Epic guidelines for minimum hardware requirements and… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager The latest PR from Brocade around the new Brocade FC32-64 port blade for Brocade X6 may cause you to wonder how this contrasts with the Cisco MDS 9700 48-port 32 Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module especially in the context of Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming (STS) which is supported by VirtualWisdom… Read More »
By Sheen Khoury, EVP Global Sales, Virtual Instruments While it’s known that selling technology is dynamic, complex and increasingly chaotic, it should never distract us from the fundamentals of good selling – especially when expanding markets. All too often people tend to overthink the importance of selling direct versus leveraging the channel – often boiling… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager Imagine that you are a taxi driver deftly navigating busy city streets to get your passenger to the airport on time and to prove that taxis remain relevant in a changing world of Uber and Lyft. If you had a choice of routes would you opt for a well-lit route… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager As a tourist walking across a historic city who doesn’t appreciate a choice of bridges each with its own unique view of the city? In the same way, when it comes to application-centric infrastructure performance management we believe you should have choices to decide how deeply you wish to view… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director Product Marketing Recently, the Virtual Instruments team took (another) trip to Las Vegas to join enterprise IT professionals for IBM’s flagship conference, IBM Think. In line with IBM’s theme this year, we challenged attendees to think about what they know (or don’t know) about managing their impossibly complex IT infrastructure…. Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer We’ve been touting the benefits of application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM) for years now, and recently made several partnerships and product announcements that continue to drive our leadership in the IPM space. But since the introduction of VirtualWisdom, our merger with Load DynamiX, the acquisition of Xangati, and many… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager A two-dimensional view is always better than a one-dimensional view, whether it is to fully appreciate a classic Chevy or whether it is to understand the impact of Dell EMC VxFlex infrastructure on your application SLA. Consider the applications of today, they have at a minimum 3 tiers of servers:… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer March Madness is here, which means everyone’s getting swept up in the excitement by filling out brackets (with some folks using very interesting methods) and gluing themselves to TV screens in homes, offices and sports bars across the country. And if your bracket had Virginia, North Carolina or Arizona… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager What does Formula 1 racing have in common with the approach taken by VirtualWisdom? In auto-racing, real-time telemetry from numerous sensors in cars enables pit crews to make active adjustments to cars while the car is on the track. Multivariate data which factors in the conditions of the track, the… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager Why rollout vSAN when you have networked storage? As a VMware customer comfortable with VMware tools like Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS), vMotion, Storage vMotion, vSphere replication – perhaps you were looking for a more efficient way to rollout new applications. Traditionally new applications required a VM which had its own… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing Who do you call when your vendors can’t fix it? Just about everyone has a story or stories like this one: an application user reports application performance issues, and everyone looks for the root cause. None of the infrastructure monitoring tools can even FIND the slowdown that your… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Recently, we had the pleasure of co-hosting a highly educational webinar with Cisco to discuss why ever-increasing numbers of enterprise IT teams are bucking the blindness trend and crossing the performance chasm by deploying next-gen App-centric storage infrastructure performance management solutions. As you may recall, back… Read More »
By Ravi Prakash, Product Manager As a relatively new product manager to VI, I was intrigued to find that many customers from my days with NetApp or IBM are also using VirtualWisdom today despite having purchased SRM tools like NetApp OnCommand Insight or IBM Spectrum Control. You might well ask why this is so? SRM… Read More »
By Louise Dilley, Regional Service Director, EMEA In the early 1800s, Britain exported beer to India. In order to stay in good condition, the beer was stronger in alcohol and hops so that neither the strength nor taste would be diminished by the long sea crossing. Indian Pale Ale (IPA) was born out of… Read More »
By Scott K Cleland, Director of Marketing I was driving to work and pondering our VI business, success, challenges, and all the potholes I was driving over.. Things we all think about. Yes, there are real potholes here in Silicon Valley! It dawned on me that, maybe, if I this, then more enterprise IT buyers… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer Last week we announced WorkloadWisdom, a significantly enhanced and rebranded version of Load DynamiX Enterprise, our award-winning storage performance validation solution that is used by both IT organizations and storage vendors. The new WorkloadWisdom has the same powerful features customers are familiar with, wrapped in an updated user interface that simplifies… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer Earlier this month, Virtual Instruments hired our new Chief Financial Officer, Peter Dayton. This was an extremely significant next step in our company’s evolution, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome Peter to the Virtual Instruments family. A quick introduction to Peter: he has more than two decades of… Read More »
By Sean O’Donnell, EMEA Managing Director, Virtual Instruments Earlier this year the Virtual Instruments team took a trip to Barcelona for the European iteration of Cisco Live, Cisco’s annual user conference where partners and customers learn new technologies, discuss business trends, share ideas and network. As you may recall, back in October we announced a… Read More »
By Paul Brodie, VP of Channel Last month we announced a significant refresh of the Virtual Instruments Partner (VIP) Program with the intention to focus on customer engagement and overall VAR profitability. We’ve noted previously on our blog how important our partners are to the success of Virtual Instruments and our customers, and this announcement… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer Recently, the Virtual Instruments team came together for what is arguably the most important sales meeting of the year – our 2018 Sales Kick-Off (SKO). As anyone working for an organization with a robust sales team can relate, SKOs play an important role in how we structure our sales team… Read More »
By John Gentry, Chief Technology Officer When it comes to applications, 2017 threw the idea of “one-size-fits-all” deployments out the window. There is a movement in IT towards more collaborative, cross-functional teams and less specialization overall. Enterprises are demanding an open ecosystem, and vendors will need to fill that demand or risk getting left in the… Read More »
By Ryan Perkowski, Senior Product Manager Prior to working at Virtual Instruments, I held various storage engineering positions within the banking industry. I started as a junior storage administrator and ultimately became the head of storage operations at a large financial institution. One of the things that stood out to me during that time was the… Read More »
By Peter Murray, Principal Systems Engineer The Spectre and Meltdown exploits, using the vulnerability in compute chipsets, present consumers of many processors – specifically x86 technologies – with a dilemma. For systems where it’s available, should you follow best practices and patch per vendor recommendations or avoid increased application latency and decreased throughput without patching? Where… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO As enterprises adopt hybrid data center strategies, IT teams are confronted with escalating scale and complexity. There’s an increased need for application and infrastructure teams to collaborate in order to avoid performance problems — as illustrated by a recent survey by ESG Research — and more and more companies are demanding… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Much new IT infrastructure today, as in the past, is deployed in production environments before IT has exercised any meaningful due diligence to determine its suitability for the job. That’s unfortunate, but it may come as no surprise. In the not-too-distant past, that was excusable, because available benchmarking and workload modeling… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing Every neighborhood features the one house that regularly disturbs the peace, whether it’s with loud music, arguing spouses or using the leaf blower at 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning. But did you know that noisy neighbors also exist in data centers and modern infrastructure environments? The generally… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing Earlier this year, Enterprise Strategy Group released a report that showed more than half of respondents had already pulled workloads back from the cloud, and 68 percent said their applications are still supported by on-premise storage. IDG and Datalink also found that nearly 40 percent of organizations with… Read More »
By Sean O’Donnell, Managing Director EMEA When you have a lot of news there is no better way to spread it than to get on the road and tell people about it. In the past month, Virtual Instruments launched a partnership with Gigamon to enable VirtualWisdom analytics on copper-based Ethernet, and a partnership with Cisco… Read More »
By Mark Samuelson, Senior Solutions Architect If you’ve been in the IT infrastructure business for a while, you know how tough it is to show real ROI on your management investments. You’re often too busy with day-to-day activities to spend time accounting for spending and savings. But quite often, we have conversations with customers who… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing In October, we previewed the new products attendees could expect to see from us at this year’s Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center Conference in Las Vegas – and now that we’re back, we wanted to relive the experience with you. When it comes… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Today is a monumental one here at Virtual Instruments, as we announced the breakthrough new version of VirtualWisdom, the industry’s most comprehensive infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform. In this post, we’ll dive into the reasons why the latest generation of VirtualWisdom is such a landmark release for our company, and… Read More »
By Chris James, Director of EMEA Marketing Earlier this month, the Virtual Instruments team traveled to Germany for the NetApp Insight conference in Berlin. More than 2,500 IT professionals from around the world attended the event to learn how to harness the power of hybrid cloud, build the next-generation data center and modernize storage management…. Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We are thrilled to announce that Peter Murray, Principal Systems Engineer and Technical Evangelist here at Virtual Instruments, has been re-appointed to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) 2018 Technical Council. Peter has been deeply involved in the SNIA for many years and was a member of the organization’s 2017 Technical… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr Director of Corporate and Field Marketing In August we and a number of other industry leaders partnered with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) to survey IT professionals on their storage system buying decisions in relation to their application workloads – and you can review a summary of the findings of that research… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO As you may have noticed, we at Virtual Instruments place an extremely high value on our partnerships. Since 2008, we’ve recognized that our partners are paramount to our success, and we’re always looking to bring new companies into the fold to help us deliver solutions that help guarantee the performance and availability… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr Director of Corporate and Field Marketing The week before last we headed to the Lone Star State of Texas for our inaugural South Central Region Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. Following on from our hugely successful Northeastern Region CAB in New York City in July, the goal was to meet with several… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Today we announced a game-changing partnership with worldwide IT and networking leader Cisco that will dramatically simplify and lower the cost of storage network performance monitoring. This news follows another important partnership announcement we made last week with IP network traffic visibility leader Gigamon, and you can learn more about the… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Hot on the heels of our recent strategic partnership announcements with Cisco and Gigamon, we’re especially excited to be returning to this year’s Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center Summit – and we wanted to share details on what this year’s attendees can expect… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Last week we announced a new partnership with Gigamon, the industry leader in visibility solutions, to provide comprehensive monitoring for NAS deployments – and we wanted to provide some context behind the partnership and the benefits it will deliver to our customers and partners. NAS environments create unique challenges for IT… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Last month we previewed some of the main attractions attendees could expect to see from us at two major storage events, Storage Developer Conference (SDC) and Hitachi NEXT 2017, and now that we’re back we wanted to share our takeaways from each highly successful event. Organized by the Storage Networking Industry Association… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing We’ve learned that sub-optimal HBA Queue Depths can impact response time by a factor of 10. This shouldn’t be surprising, so let me explain a little more. Queue Depth on an array is the physical limit of exchanges that can be open on a storage port at any one… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We’re pleased to share that Virtual Instruments has been positioned as the “Value Leader” and the vendor with the “Best Predictive Analytics” capabilities in Enterprise Management Associates’ (EMA’s) 2017 Radar Report on Storage Intelligence. EMA stated that it was “very impressed” with our vision for enabling dynamic workload placements and recommendations based… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO It’s September, so everyone’s Facebook feeds are likely filling up with photos of kids going back to school, and football season is finally here! But what’s gotten us excited here at Virtual Instruments are two key storage industry events taking place over the next two weeks – because if you only… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing TPC is costly and dated. We can save you money and modernize your monitoring It’s not a secret, IBM’s Spectrum Control, AKA TPC, is getting long in the tooth. It’s expensive and IBM doesn’t seem committed to keeping it up to date with the latest industry technologies. When companies… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Director, Product Marketing In April, we announced Load DynamiX Enterprise 5.3, the latest version of our storage performance validation solution, and in an accompanying blog post we took an in-depth look at what was new in the release – as well as how the new features help our customers. We have now… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Last week, we released the results of research on IT professionals’ storage system buying decisions in relation to their application workloads, and we wanted to share a summary of the most notable findings from the research. Without sharing too many spoilers, one of the key findings was that IT teams are… Read More »
By Lisa Alger, Senior Vice President, Engineering Last year, Virtual Instruments had a bit of a growth spurt. Not only did we merge with storage performance analytics provider Load DynamiX, but we also acquired virtualization and cloud performance monitoring specialist Xangati. By integrating key technologies and innovative ideas from both companies, we’ve created the industry’s first… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Director, Product Marketing So much of the financial and stock trading world is complex, confusing and does not affect our normal daily lives. The world’s five biggest hedge funds today all use systems-based approaches to trade financial markets. This computer domination of the richest corner of the investment management industry has been building… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Last week we crossed the country to New York City for our annual Northeastern Region Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting, and it was a hugely successful session that continued the momentum built during last year’s inaugural meeting. As with all of our regional CABs, the goal of the in-depth session was… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing Maybe I’ve been in the data storage business too long, but I remember the bad old days when customers routinely avoided deploying new storage products. Their fear was “how will this new technology perform, and will it perform reliably?” Even new firmware releases were met with resistance. I… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO I just finished reading an interesting new Gartner study on developing a practical workload placement strategy. Gartner lists 10 business factors when rationalizing where workloads belong. Some are obvious, and some, like regulatory issues, are less so. Of the top 10, four are directly related in some fashion to performance… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Director, Product Marketing Every Global 1000 Company, through their trusted IT and DevOps groups evaluates their current and future storage needs to meet increasingly demanding performance and availability requirements from their business partners. Many have selected Virtual Instruments Load DynamiX Enterprise (LDX-E) workload generator appliances to ensure the storage they select will… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO If you’re familiar with Virtual Instruments to any degree, you know that our focus is providing enterprises with comprehensive application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM) solutions. And while we do our very best to clearly explain to our customers and partners what app-centric IPM is and the benefits it provides, it’s always instructive… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Every year, twice a year, we have an event season. It takes place from April through June and September through early December. With the 4th of July just behind us, we’re now in the heart of the summer – and while that means beach days for some and a reminder that the… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing We recently conducted a highly enlightening webinar with Storage Switzerland on the topic of storage refresh best practices, and in case you missed it, we’re sharing the key takeaways that you can start applying today for immediate gains in efficiency, risk reduction, and cost savings. Storage… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Director, Product Marketing Healthcare organizations rely on instant data access to make life-saving decisions. Patient record availability is not just a regulatory requirement—it’s critical to delivering quality care. Healthcare IT managers must maintain a highly available and high performance application infrastructure to run the clinical applications that support critical patient services. Proactively Monitor… Read More »
By Peter Murray, Principal Systems Engineer Storage testing is all about making it as real as possible, and real applications send I/O in sub-second, or what are called “micro” bursts. Shareware tools like IOMeter and FIO were designed to test disk drives. In the days of disk drives, sub-second, or “micro” bursts were much less… Read More »
By Tim Van Ash, SVP of Products Recently, we announced the new 5.6 version of our Load DynamiX Test Development Environment (TDE) and a new family of Workload Generation Appliances. These enhancements allow our customers to make the most of their network and storage investments by providing a broad and precise understanding of storage system behavior. “The… Read More »
By Scott Cleland, Director, Product Marketing As I mentioned last time… I spent time with a great customer in the University healthcare and hospital field and was floored with the complexity, pain, and struggles with balancing application delivery, performance and availability for 2 entirely different constituents. I promised more on this customer. UTHealth has fully… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing If storage vendors could custom-build products based on individual customer application profiles, there might not be a need to test. But they do not, and so storage engineers and architects must go beyond the simple performance profiles that appear in spec sheets, and the guidelines provided by “industry… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We’re extremely excited to share that Virtual Instruments has won the 2017 Storage Awards’ Storage Monitoring & Reporting Vendor of the Year award. Presented by the U.K.’s Storage Magazine and dubbed ‘The Storries’ XIV, the awards recognize vendors, teams and individuals advancing innovation in all areas of the storage industry, including… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing In a perfect world with limitless resources, we would do storage performance testing using the same equipment and applications as we expect to use in production. But in the real world, it’s simply not feasible, primarily due to the scale found in production. Both synthetic models and “real”… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Summer’s here, so it’s time to grab some refreshments, hit the beach and work on our tans. It also means that schools are shutting down for summer vacation, causing parents across the land to secretly shudder at the thought of their homes being overrun by kids with too much energy and… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO It’s no secret that IT downtime costs organizations of all types and sizes a considerable amount of money, time and resources, but it really hits home when you dig into the numbers: last year, research firm IHS Markit estimated that crashed IT systems cost North American businesses anywhere from $1 million… Read More »
By Scott K. Cleland, Director, Product Marketing I spent time with a great customer in the University healthcare and hospital field this week and was floored with the complexity, pain and struggles with balancing application delivery, performance and availability for 2 entirely different constituents. On one hand, they serve the students and faculty (nearly 12,000 users)… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Today, I’m excited to share that our CTO, John Gentry, has received one of the industry’s highest honors and was named to Information Age’s Global Leader list. One of eight people chosen for this prestigious award, John was honored for his industry thought leadership, his work at Virtual Instruments and, most… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Every spring our trade show season jumps off in earnest with our attendance and participation at Dell EMC World, and this year was no exception as we’re fresh off the heels of a fantastic week of customer and partner meetups and conversations. From open networking to digital transformation to hybrid IT,… Read More »
Think of when you are driving your car on a commute. You are emulating an application winding its way from user to data centre, doing some work, and then returning. On your car dashboard you have the speedometer (think of this as the Application Performance Monitor (APM) that lets you know how fast you are… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO This week we’re coming to you live from Las Vegas at the Dell EMC World show, which takes place from May 8th through 11th. We’ve got a packed week ahead with some exciting product news, demonstrations with Dell EMC and great speaking engagements from our team. We’re also excited to engage… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Recently, our CEO Philippe Vincent went on the Tech Blog Writer Podcast to discuss what’s new with Virtual Instruments and the need for app-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM) solutions. It’s a really interesting listen, and relatively short, so you should definitely check it out. One thing that jumped out at me… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr Director of Marketing Our customers are truly innovative and outcome-focused—advancing their companies and respective industries forward every day. Today, we wanted to share a particularly compelling story about our customer Insight, and how we worked together to help them gain an authoritative understanding of their infrastructure performance with VirtualWisdom. Insight is… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO As you may have seen, today we announced the latest version of Load DynamiX Enterprise 5.3. If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that Load DynamiX is our storage performance validation solution, designed to let you validate the performance and optimize the cost of your storage investments. What you’re probably… Read More »
Save time, save cost and save your job By Scott Cleland, Director of Product Marketing Why should a Fortune 500 enterprise company use a workload acquisition, workload analysis, workload modeling and workload performance analytics product like Virtual Instruments Load DynamiX (LDX) Enterprise 5.3? Even the largest and smartest Fortune 500 companies can find themselves mired… Read More »
By Ryan Perkowski, Senior Product Manager We at VI are often asked … what are common NAS problems and how do you find them? I know that users are frustrated, simply because I used to be one. They’ve have been forced to live with the pain of getting escalated to, and not finding root causes. … Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We’re excited to share that industry veterans Sheen Khoury and Rick Haggart have joined Virtual Instruments. Sheen is our new Executive VP of worldwide sales, and Rick Haggart is our new SVP of professional services. Both bring a wealth of experience and are a perfect fit for our team because they… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing In our ongoing work with customers, we usually see two universal truths in every corporate IT department. The first is always stay on budget. The second is that everyone is in a constant state of transformation. And more often than not, these two truths are at… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO All organizations want their IT systems to perform optimally. This is easier said than done, however. If it were easy, every organization would have implemented a performance optimization, performance management or other solution to get the most out of their systems. What is keeping organizations from optimizing performance? There are almost… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director of Product Marketing The Amazon Cloud Storage Failure is why many enterprises keep their storage on-prem. When we ask many of our long-time customers about when they are going to move their business or mission critical apps to the cloud, they often point to stories like this S3 outage and… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director of Product Marketing Software-defined storage (SDS) is an evolving concept where server-based storage software manages policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of hardware. Software-defined storage definitions typically include a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages the storage infrastructure. The operating… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO When we rolled out our NAS Performance Probe with VirtualWisdom5 back in September, we viewed it as an important step toward making good on our promise to innovate after our merger with Load DynamiX. As a combined company, we were uniquely positioned to see where customers were getting bogged down in… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director of Product Marketing As the long-time gold standard in SAN performance monitoring, Virtual Instruments just recently got into the NAS space. And even MORE recently, our NAS Probe won Gold in the SearchStorage/Storage Magazine Product of the Year Storage and SAN Management Tools Category. We knew that there was… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Five years is a lifetime in IT. Five years ago, the iPhone 4S was brand new technology, and DevOps wasn’t as fully formed as it is today. Our work in the infrastructure performance management space (IPM) has evolved dramatically given the ongoing and ever-changing demands enterprise IT teams face, as well… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO As an engineer, you are acutely aware of one truth: you can never sit still. You have to improve your skills constantly and look to the next wave of technologies you’ll have to learn. This is especially true for DevOps engineers. With an area as new and constantly changing as DevOps,… Read More »
By Ray Villeneuve, President Last week’s news of Cisco’s $3.7 billion purchase of APM vendor AppDynamics was a welcome development. The move signals the vastly understated importance of application performance in today’s enterprise, as covered in detail by Ron Miller of TechCrunch. With the various types of applications companies deploy to run their mission-critical and… Read More »
Cross-domain correlation speeds application delivery by Scott Cleland, Director, Product Marketing Remember this? If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. The need to possess “the right tool for the job” is now more apparent than ever before when it comes to IT infrastructure management, optimization and governance. Managing… Read More »
You can’t measure performance without the right tools By Ryan Perkowski, Senior Product Manager Person 1 – “How was the commute this morning?” Person 2 – “Oh, about 1000 cars per hour.” What a strange way to answer this common question. Person 1 wanted to know how long it took Person 2 to commute to… Read More »
By Chris James, EMEA Marketing Director In the past few years applications have been getting more and more complex. The infrastructure supporting them has had to perform better and better each year within budget constraints – but it’s still primarily measured in its availability. Why is that? Historically application performance has not been measured –… Read More »
Following is a guest post by John Kim, co-founder and managing partner, HighBar Partners, discussing the firm’s work with its portfolio companies and the quest to build an application-centric infrastructure performance management powerhouse – Virtual Instruments. When HighBar Partners invested in Load DynamiX in 2014, we started on a path to enhance application delivery from… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer From incredible sports moments like the Cubs finally winning the World Series, to the unprecedented political happenings in the U.S. and abroad, 2016 was the year of change. And for the Virtual Instruments team, this couldn’t be more true. A merger, an acquisition, product enhancements and new executive hires… Read More »
By John Gentry, Chief Technology Officer, Virtual Instruments With the new year here, it wouldn’t feel right if our blog didn’t feature a few predictions about how we see things progressing in 2017. At Virtual Instruments, we’re focused on performance monitoring and analytics-driven insights for proactively managing your IT infrastructure. Let’s face it, though every… Read More »
As we near year’s end, we share thanks and gratitude for our customers, partners and dedicated employees. 2016 has been an exciting year as we welcomed Load DynamiX and Xangati to the Virtual Instruments family. We’re excited to expand on the many initiatives and solutions we introduced this year including our new Customer Success Programs,… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Storage Switzerland’s George Crump recently wrote an analyst note about our Xangati acquisition, titled “Real-time Performance Analysis for the Hybrid Data Center.” He spoke with us about what today’s modern corporate IT teams need to manage their hybrid infrastructures. The Storage Switzerland note breaks down the APM and IPM market silos, and… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We’ve had an overwhelming response to our recent acquisition of Xangati, a provider of hybrid cloud and virtualization management solutions. Customers are excited to see our integrated solutions help them manage their complex and ever-changing infrastructure, and how that affects their application performance. Partners are excited about the capabilities of expanding… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO LoadDynamiX Enterprise just got better. Today, Virtual Instruments rolled out the 5.2 version of our workload analysis and workload modeling solution, and we think you’re going to like what it means for your ability to visualize production workload data and understand the I/O characteristics of your storage workloads. We’ve improved workload… Read More »
By Chris James, Director of EMEA Marketing The aesthete Stephen Bailey once interviewed the captain of an SR 71 “Blackbird”, the fastest air breathing plane that once flew from New York to London in just under one hour 55 minutes. When it is fired up the two ramjet engines are in sync. If one has an… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Your IT infrastructure is very much like a living organism, interacting with many different people, systems, technologies and networks. Whether you’re tasked with integrating projects like enterprise mobility, hybrid cloud, big data or the Internet of Things, your application performance is widely varied, to say the least. The requirements to maintain… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO Last week we announced that Virtual Instruments has acquired Xangati, a hybrid cloud and virtualization performance management company. In the coming months, we will dive deeper into how our Xangati acquisition will let us further expand our capabilities to help companies manage their ever-changing and increasingly complex hybrid data centers. Our… Read More »
I’m excited to welcome Xangati and its customers into the Virtual Instruments family! The combination of Xangati and Virtual Instruments creates a powerhouse in infrastructure performance management (IPM). For too long there has been a gap between applications and traditional siloed approaches to Infrastructure performance monitoring. These inadequate solutions just provide more data, not the… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO 2016 has been a year of incredible transition and growth for Virtual Instruments, and today, we announced our acquisition of Xangati, a hybrid cloud and virtualization performance management company. Xangati founder Jagan Jagannathan is now chief innovation officer of Virtual Instruments, and he’ll help lead our shared team toward its mission… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing When a company invests in a technology or vendor, the results it delivers can be all over the “impactful solutions” spectrum. At the basic level, investments should solve problems and/or create efficiencies where none previously existed, without requiring significant efforts or introducing risks to the business…. Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO When you’re evaluating your IT infrastructure – whether it’s physical, virtual, the cloud or a combination of the three – one important concept always comes up: workload analysis. Workload analysis is such a basic part of what we all care about that we often just glaze over the topic and assume… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director of Product Marketing Flash doesn’t solve all performance or availability problems. Below are six reasons those issues can outlast a flash installation, and how to manage them over time. Networked storage is a complex beast. If you’ve put flash on your laptop, you might have solved most of your performance… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO We work day in and day out to answer the following question: How can we help our customers assure that their applications and infrastructure will perform better together? This question drives us as a team because our goal is to provide as much overarching support as possible for enterprises as they… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer We recently welcomed Lisa Alger as our new senior vice president of engineering. We’re lucky to have her. Lisa is charged with managing our entire engineering and product build, as well spearheading our customer service & QA organizations. Lisa has a strong track record of technical, product and business… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO of Virtual Instruments Last week, we announced the launch of VirtualWisdom5 and the VirtualWisdom Network Attached Storage (NAS) Performance Probe, the industry’s first real-time monitoring solution for both SAN and NAS environments. With our expansion into the NAS-based storage market, our team is bringing the advantages and capabilities of VirtualWisdom to… Read More »
By Tim Van Ash, Senior Vice President of Products Until now, vendor-independent performance monitoring for network attached storage (NAS) workloads has been hard to come by. IT teams tasked with ensuring the performance of business-critical NAS apps have had two choices for problem-solving. They could use complicated packet capture (PCAP) tools to send information to… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing It was a fantastic summer with lots of enjoyable moments, and now fall is upon us—with a number of exciting events coming up for us here at Virtual Instruments. We’re heading back out on the road to do one of our favorite things: evangelize infrastructure performance… Read More »
By Jim Bahn, Senior Director, Product Marketing Over the past few years, I’ve talked with several IT pros who try to match their storage infrastructure buys with their application performance needs. Kudos to them for trying. Frankly, if you just depend on the storage vendor’s spec sheets, the claims look so similar that I pity… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO The official end of summer is signaled not only by Labor Day but also by VMworld, which always convenes the week prior to the start of the holiday weekend. This year, the conference headed back to Las Vegas, which naturally feels more frenzied given the locale. Another tradition those of us… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing It’s no secret that Flash offers many advantages over traditional memory. When considering moving to all-Flash (or at least hybrid) data centers, however, it’s not as simple as switching out the technology and firing it up. At the Flash Memory Summit 2016 in Santa Clara, our… Read More »
By Chris James, Director of EMEA Marketing There is much discussion about how the software provided by data centre hardware vendors can monitor system and application performance effectively with in-band agents. The short answer is it can’t. Agents or ‘in-hardware’ monitoring add load to the data stream and consume CPU resources – therefore they can’t… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing One of the observations we continue to see from our customers and partners is that data centers are perpetually shifting and transforming—there really is no end-state. It just so happens that the shift occurring right now could be one of the most impactful to ever hit… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Last week we attended the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California. Since last year, the show has grown significantly in terms of size and attendees, which is a strong indicator of the growing trend of flash in the data center. While some are already hailing… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer In today’s day and age, the performance of your business-critical IT infrastructure is paramount. We eat, sleep and breathe this at Virtual Instruments. It’s our job and mission to help our customers maintain the necessary uptime and performance they need to support their rapidly growing data stores and digital… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer Migrating certain application workloads to the cloud can offer a host of benefits for enterprise IT teams. There’s no doubt that it helps plan for disaster scenarios, increases cost efficiency and helps companies keep pace with the changing storage industry. However, some roadblocks continue to stand between many organizations… Read More »
By Tim Van Ash, Senior Vice President of Product Virtual Instruments is committed to helping storage vendors and enterprises make the most of their data center and storage investments, and that means constantly upgrading up our solutions. Today, we’re announcing the addition of 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 32 Gigabit Fibre Channel capabilities to our Load… Read More »
By Gavin Tweedie, Director of Operations, EMEA Great Britain voted at the end of June to end its 40 year relationship with Europe. What has come out in the past week or so is that the many voters didn’t fully understand what they were voting for and what it meant for the country and Europe… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO of Virtual Instruments I can still remember the first time I saw an original Apple computer. Awkward and clunky as it may seem today, at the time, it was pure brilliance. At Virtual Instruments, we see first hand how rapidly technology changes. We specialize in helping IT organizations transform their infrastructures… Read More »
By: Len Rosenthal, CMO of Virtual Instruments While the official start of summer is always June 20 or 21, July 4 is usually when most of the U.S. finally starts to feel like the season is kicking off. We wait year-round for the day when we can celebrate summer with fireworks, barbeque and all things… Read More »
By John Gentry, CTO of Virtual Instruments As business becomes more focused on technology and mobile, many companies are looking for ways to improve on the traditional Agile development methodology. Where Agile isn’t the strongest match for modern enterprise needs, implementing a DevOps approach provides a way for businesses to adapt to, keep up with… Read More »
By Gavin Tweedie, Director of EMEA Operations If you’ve been following #WhereInTheWorldIsVI, then you know that our summer is off to a busy start. Following EMC World in May, we attended HPE Discover early in June, and announced that Virtual Instruments has expanded our global alliances program and joined the HPE Complete Partner Program. Looking… Read More »
By Kalen Kimm, VP of Strategic Alliances, Virtual Instruments It’s been an exciting past couple of months for the Virtual Instruments team between our merger news and launching WorkloadCentral at EMC World. But you can rest assured we aren’t planning on taking a vacation this summer and that some of our most exciting news is yet… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Coming off the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, banks and the financial services industry were mainly focused on regulatory and governance cycles. Today, this market is ripe for disruption with huge amounts of capital in 2015 raised to support new companies looking to cater to expanding… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer We’re talking about it; you’re talking about it; the whole industry is talking about it. Cloud migration is a top-of-mind topic for not only data storage professionals, but enterprise IT teams altogether. We’ve talked about what to consider when migrating your workloads before, but we’re taking it back to the… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Mention the word “summer” and you’ll get a variety of positive reactions: vacation, sunshine, and that delicious Fourth of July barbeque we’ve been craving all year. And while it’s good to enjoy your well-deserved time off, your IT infrastructure can’t afford to take a vacation. From June… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Ah, EMC World. Every year, the conference is a chance to connect with our customers and demo some of our solutionsrecent enhancements. Our chief technology officer, John Gentry, had a moment in the spotlight this year, explaining how large IT organizations use Virtual Instruments’ solution portfolio to make… Read More »
By Tim Van Ash, senior vice president of products at Virtual Instruments As an IT professional, you’re constantly trying to avoid performance problems and make better deployment decisions. Understanding application workload I/O profiles is critical to ensuring optimal storage infrastructure performance. And, chances are, you’re making educated guesses, relying on your instincts and taking recommendations from… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Remember Carmen Sandiego, the globetrotting character who took her audiences on educational quests to solve problems? The newly merged Virtual Instruments is taking a page out of her book. And, where in the world will we be the first week of May? EMC World, of course,… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing We want our customers to know one thing: we hear you. We heard you when you said it would be helpful to tighten the integration between IPM and storage performance analytics (hence our recent company news), and we’re hearing you now. You’re IT leaders – you… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO for Load DynamiX Last week we announced Load DynamiX is merging with Virtual Instruments, and the industry response was immediate: this is a merger that makes sense for our customers, our partners and for the needs of the industry. Our team sees a strong synergy between the two companies, and we… Read More »
By Len Rosenthal, CMO of Virtual Instruments When we announced last week that Virtual Instruments and Load DynamiX were merging, the industry responded with comments about the obvious synergy between the two companies. That sentiment echoed internal feelings about the deal, which will deliver benefits for our partners, and the industry overall. Below is a… Read More »
By Philippe Vincent, CEO, Load DynamiX For some time, we’ve heard from our customers about a need for tighter integration between Load DynamiX Enterprise and Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom platform for infrastructure performance management (IPM). Today, we announced the upcoming merger of Load DynamiX and Virtual Instruments. The new company will be known as Virtual Instruments… Read More »
By John Gentry, CTO of the new Virtual Instruments Today, infrastructure is in a constant state of transformation. Whether it’s migrating legacy systems to new platforms, introducing all solid-state storage or exploring converged, hyperconverged and ultimately cloud, our customers are undergoing continual change. Those changes are a big part of what led to another transformation… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing Companies running virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) are well aware of the problems posed by even the slightest bottleneck. One user uses a bit more bandwidth than expected and, suddenly, every employee sees greater latency when trying to load a mission-critical application. VDI systems with end-user facing… Read More »
By Jason Cowie, Vice President of Strategic Alliances Systems integrations are increasingly common in enterprise IT as the market adapts and consolidates in response to economic shifts. Just look at the growing number of mergers and acquisitions in storage, healthcare IT and other verticals. Integrating infrastructures and systems are complex undertakings that come with significant… Read More »
Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing So, you want performance analytics? As you should. Analytics-based decision-making has helped IT administrators promote efficiency and cost optimization in their enterprises. It’s also shown companies errors in their workflows and generally improved their end users’ experiences. Getting more data about end-to-end performance, and making adjustments based… Read More »
By Bo Barker, Vice President of Services The amount of people with a stake in your IT infrastructure performance is significant. It’s not just you and your team. Its end users, customers, co-workers — anyone and everyone who relies on the applications you support. None of these people really care about capacity planning, technology upgrades… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances Enterprise IT looks differently than it did a year ago. This is common for the industry – it changes rapidly as new technology emerges and new processes are implemented. Healthcare IT has experienced much of the same in recent years. Driven by federal mandates to… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing For many IT performance problems, there are no simple solutions. Infrastructures are complex and perpetually evolving, with myriad applications pulling data from every corner of connected systems. Such complexity begets problems that are not so easy to identify or resolve. It’s not just that complexity… Read More »
There comes a time when freeware products just aren’t going to cut it Here at Load DynamiX, we often hear comments like, “I understand the importance of performance testing of storage arrays, but I’ve been using shareware tools for years and they are doing an OK job. Why should I spend money on Load DynamiX?”… Read More »
By Aravind Sivanesan, Sr. Director, Alliances Technical Strategy and Enablement The way IT enables and aligns to the enterprise is ever-changing. However, for too long, the way that IT performance problems are resolved has remained unchanged. Infrastructure outages, latency issues and performance degradations occur continually, and every team within IT shares the risk and responsibility… Read More »
Storage performance troubleshooting just got easier So much has been learned and written about how to find and fix storage related performance problems that I wondered if there’s anything new that can be done. There are tons of best practices, monitoring products, and professional services all dedicated to solving this often quixotic burden. But at… Read More »
by Raj Patel Outsourcing IT solutions and capabilities has long been the preferred method for procuring advanced business solutions for many companies. However bringing solution creation, development and execution in-house enables businesses to support innovations across the enterprise in an agile, cohesive and consistent way. This practice fits under the DevOps model, and it is… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances Legacy systems aren’t a problem in enterprise IT until they are. As cloud and virtualization strategies continue to evolve at a breakneck pace however, it’s become increasingly difficult for legacy systems to keep pace. When legacy systems impede innovation and agile business demands, administrators need solutions… Read More »
By Darren Boyd, Senior Product Marketing Manager No matter which department he or she works in, any employee of a hospital or healthcare facility knows the No. 1 priority – patient care. Every aspect of the organization needs to be focused on ensuring patients receive the best care and treatment. For healthcare IT workers, this… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing Our team prides itself on being composed of people with focused and extensive expertise when it comes to IT infrastructure performance management. Our engineers, executives, sales and services teams are well versed in speaking to and delivering solutions to many of the largest enterprises in… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing The motivation for everything we do at Virtual Instruments is equipping IT administrators and teams focused on digital business performance with the insights they need to make confident data-informed decisions about configurations, workloads and investments related to infrastructure. The better the insights these pros have… Read More »
By John Gentry, vice president of marketing alliances With the rate of IT evolution, it’s never easy to make firm predictions about what new tech will emerge in a coming year. Every 12 months, a new analyst or expert report details how the cloud will finally reach mass-market adoption, but the landscape that will support… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing Earlier this month, Virtual Instruments attended the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in Las Vegas. It was the last show in a year filled with thought-leadership events, affording us several opportunities to discuss and align with experts, vendors and other influencers in… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Director of Product and Digital Marketing No one benefits when IT teams struggle to solve problems, particularly when those issues are slowing down the entire business. And, even if they solve a problem in a few hours, it may well happen again. Some of the most common results of persistent IT… Read More »
Which storage technology is best for your Oracle based app? There’s much debate on which storage technology (i.e. flash storage or tiered storage) will perform best for an Oracle application. Many Oracle gurus say the standard block size for OLTP apps should be small, around 4KB. That being the case, AFA products should excel for… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – Study after study proves the ever-increasing popularity of e-commerce as a primary method for buying goods and services. People will continue to spend billions online every year, and B2C and retail e-commerce brands understand all too well the problems caused by a slow website, never… Read More »
By Sam Curcuruto, Product Marketing Manager – A recent report from Deloitte found that 82 percent of financial services executives believe innovation is among the most important aspects of their industry moving forward. These companies are constantly in search of exciting new ways to run their businesses, design their products, deliver their services and do… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – Any seasoned IT worker can remember a time when his knowledge and insight led to a quick, elegant answer to some issue with performance. A few servers timed out or a boot storm led to greater latency and frustration for co-workers, and the team’s… Read More »
Cuts 3 month Flash Storage POC & testing plan down to 2 weeks using Load DynamiX Watch this video to see how a large financial institution will be able to save millions by doing a flash storage POC bake-off using Load DynamiX. A large financial institution wished to evaluate solutions both from their existing storage… Read More »
By Darren Boyd, Senior Product Marketing Manager – Accountability and reliability are demands and goals of every government initiative. Wasted spending and failed initiatives are the kind of problems that plague government organizations. Earlier this year, the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) went into effect, calling for, among other things, increased accountability in… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – Technology partnerships help IT vendors reach wider audiences across all industries to best serve end customers. At Virtual Instruments, we recognized the value of enabling our partner ecosystem with an authoritative analytics platform for infrastructure performance management that drives strategic value for our partners as… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – Heading into the final months of 2015, it’s a great time to look back at the year and think about everything we’ve accomplished. The release of VirtualWisdom4.3 in August was an important one for Virtual Instruments. Spending September sharing it with the analyst and… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Director of Product and Digital Marketing – Infrastructure complexity isn’t often the focal point of discussions related to speed of the digital economy. Sales teams, marketers and others rely on IT to deliver premium solutions and capability that make their businesses attractive options for customers or partners for other companies. A financial… Read More »
By Sam Curcuruto, Product Marketing Manager – For healthcare IT administrators, the last few years have been quite hectic. Almost universally, hospitals and other facilities have been forced into upgrades and adjustments to their IT infrastructures. Whether in response to new regulations or out of necessity, electronic medical records and other newer solutions are staples in… Read More »
By Darren Boyd, Senior Product Marketing Manager – Here’s a great quote about performance metrics that has nothing to do with IT. Writing in his “Baseball Abstract, 1985,” Bill James makes these points about statistics: 1. Baseball statistics have the ability to conjure images 2. Baseball statistics can tell stories. 3. Baseball statistics acquire from these… Read More »
By Sam Curcuruto, Product Marketing Manager – More than 25,000 people descended upon Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for VMworld 2015, and Virtual Instruments was at full throttle for it all. One thing that rang true this year more than ever is the need for optimized performance. We talked to attendees who spanned… Read More »
A few days ago, one of our customers ran a test, comparing how well Load DynamiX Enterprise, Iometer, and Vdbench created random data. They were trying to determine which test solution would result in the most realistic models, to use in Flash array performance evaluations. In production workloads, random data typically contains very few repeating… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate Field Marketing – At Virtual Instruments, we spent the better part of the summer preparing for everything August had to offer. Launching a new version of our flagship infrastructure performance management (IPM) platform and pulling everything together for the season’s biggest conference, VMworld, are the rewards for working… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – Systems are increasing in complexity; ingesting more, signaling faster, connecting farther. IT is demanding a wider viewing angle into its holistic environment and greater precision to determine where to invest its resources. IT departments tire of the additive approach to solving problems, whereby capacity, ports,… Read More »
By Gabriel Cortes, Service Delivery Manager – Converged infrastructures aren’t anything too new in principle. In practice, though, the concept is one to which IT departments have adjusted slowly. It hasn’t been an issue of converged systems lacking utility for enterprise IT so much as a pretty major paradigm shift with massive amounts of moving… Read More »
By Sam Curcuruto, Product Marketing Manager – As all of us at Virtual Instruments prepare pallets of swag, collateral and booth materials for shipment to Moscone Center in San Francisco for VMworld 2015, we’re excited for plenty of conversations with our customers and partners. This year’s theme is “Ready for Any,” which fits perfectly with… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – IT workers have spent the better part of the last decade thinking about the cloud. The cloud offers plenty of benefits, but those promised perks of cutting costs and making departments more agile don’t come without risks. CIOs need to consider every option and… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – There was a time when business decisions often came down to hunches. Sales, marketing, human resources and even IT frequently opted for new hires, new technology and other additions because they just seemed right; some kind of gut feeling suggested it was the best move,… Read More »
By Darren Boyd, senior product marketing manager – No matter the reason for an IT investment, the ultimate goal is almost always the same – to provide a better end-user experience. It doesn’t really matter if the end user is an employee, partner or a customer. Applications need to function. Workloads need to be available…. Read More »
By Sam Curcuruto, Product Marketing Manager – Which is older — the fall of the Ottoman Empire or the New York City Subway? If you said the Ottoman Empire, you’re sadly mistaken. A recent article published by Gizmodo details the story of the infrastructure supporting the NYC subway system in all its ancient glory. Traffic… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – At Virtual Instruments, our goal is to simplify heterogeneous infrastructure performance management (IPM) by capturing a unique combination of wire data and machine data and then applying context-specific analytics to deliver the key insights and answers that enterprise IT teams need. With VirtualWisdom4, we… Read More »
By Raj Patel, senior director of corporate field marketing – In June, Virtual Instruments’ employees were busy going from conference to conference to discuss infrastructure performance management (IPM) with the customers of several of our partners. This month, though, we looked at a number of critical issues within IT, analyzing the numerous ways in which… Read More »
By Ryan VerVaecke, Sr. Principal Architect – Performance metrics play a significant role in the operation of the modern data center. We need to know the speed at which different processes function and are available. So, IT focuses heavily on a number of analytics derived from performance data to assess the health of its systems…. Read More »
By Venu Lambu, Global Head of Markets, Cognizant Infrastructure Services – When it comes to enterprise IT Infrastructure, revolution is in the air. The technology landscape is changing at breakneck speed. The rapid and complex evolution of the technology universe, dominated with trends, such as virtualization, social, mobility, analytics and cloud computing, is only increasing… Read More »
By Darren Boyd, Service Delivery Manager – On July 14, Microsoft ended its extended support of Windows Server 2003. These machines will no longer receive security upgrades and other support from the company. Most organizations have long since removed these legacy systems from their data centers, however, IT consulting firm SoftChoice reported late last year… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – Any enterprise IT worker can attest to the fact that IT availability doesn’t always equate to strong performance. Frustratingly, though, many Web apps run on cloud services that come with service-level agreements centered solely on availability without taking more valuable metrics into account. As… Read More »
Listen to this 8 minute podcast on flash storage benchmarking sponsored by the Tolly Group and featuring Load DynamiX. Flash Storage is increasingly important in Enterprise and cloud computing, while still relatively expensive, it can provide significant performance benefits. To be certain that the flash-based array is delivering up to its specifications, one needs to… Read More »
Originally a key consumer technology fitting inside music players, mobile phones and large sized appliances, flash storage is now engulfing the enterprise storage space through large-scale all-flash arrays. Jim Bahn from Load DynamiX offers key tips on how IT practitioners can cost-effectively exploit flash storage for a wide number of business applications. So listen to the… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – As is the case with most industries, finance houses are fully enveloped in the big data craze. These firms have seen myriad benefits from deeper application of the data they store and manage, necessitating the creation of entire departments aimed solely at managing and working… Read More »
By Jason Cowie, Director of Global Strategic Alliances – Think about the last time your company made a major infrastructure upgrade. Systems administrators wanted more automation and better integration for networking, storage and other infrastructure components. The C-level wanted something that could modernize aspects of IT and make assorted processes more efficient. When it’s time… Read More »
In a recent survey of storage architects at F500 companies, 54% said that over the next 12 months, they’d be deploying all flash arrays. Not exclusively, but for select applications. And while flash arrays offer significant environmental / footprint benefits, performance is the reason everyone is evaluating solid state storage. That being said, 9 of… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – It’s always interesting to hear stories from colleagues about the old days of IT. They recount tales about some of the integrations and projects they single-handedly spear-headed, and it can be amazing how different the ecosystem looks today. Workers throughout an enterprise now have… Read More »
By Lee Jiles, Strategic Alliances – IT workers have developed a reputation as problem solvers for a reason. The nature of IT demands that they constantly think quickly and use every piece of information available to solve even the most minor issue. It’s impressive what an IT team can figure out with enough time. Is… Read More »
By Jason Cowie, Global Strategic Alliances Our team has spent a good amount of time in the last couple months on the conference circuit. Whether it was EMC World, HP Discover, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) or IBM Edge, there were a number of important trends that we and the other attendees discussed…. Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate Field Marketing – At Virtual Instruments, we want to serve enterprises across industries. To that end, in June, we spent much of our time on the conference circuit, discussing the ways infrastructure performance management (IPM) has helped organizations of all kinds solve their most perplexing IT problems. There’s… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – The days of every new technology investment going through IT are long gone. Chief information officers (CIOs) and other IT decision-makers still have to approve the big investments, but, more often, other departments are identifying new Web apps or services that they think will… Read More »
By Barry Cooks, Senior Vice President of Products, Engineering and Support – There’s a lot of advice out there related to the progression of the modern IT team. The machines, software and other technologies we use are different than they used to be, so the way we operate has to change, as well. Among the… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – Last year, Gartner detailed the concept of “bimodal IT,” which, quite simply, divides IT into two arenas: one is the traditional support and security role, and one calls for extensive innovation and constant improvement of business processes. Even as the first mode concerned with… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – When we first got Virtual Instruments off the ground, we had lofty goals. We looked at this concept of infrastructure performance management (IPM) and knew there was a need for a solution and technology that helped IT workers across industries solve their complex data center… Read More »
By Mike Moore, Chief Information Officer – The role of a CIO in 2015 differs vastly from the same position just five years ago. The influx of managed services has enabled companies to adopt a number of technologies and capabilities they either couldn’t afford before or hired several employees to handle. There’s now less up-front… Read More »
A few weeks ago, Yahoo’s Flickr photo service announced a big upgrade. It allows users to store up to 1TB of hi-res photos for free. I’ve been a Flickr user since 2006 and this is BIG NEWS. And as I’m writing this post, my home system is uploading over 26,000 photos to Flickr. How can… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – In reflecting on theCUBE’s interview with our CEO John Thompson at EMC World last month, I was drawn to a couple acute points he made regarding the cloud, as well as a particularly emphatic statement he made about the key to a startup’s success. In… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – We at Virtual Instruments pride ourselves on delivering real-time performance data and answers for highly complex IT infrastructures. There isn’t a single industry that needs these instant solutions more than health care. Enterprise IT requires similarly speedy results, but the consequences for some latency… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – We should all be congratulating the cloud on graduating from buzzword status, with Gartner predicting almost half of large enterprises will have incorporated hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. There are varying motivations, ranging from cost savings to increased agility, but no… Read More »
By Chris James, Director, EMEA Marketing – The biggest private or hybrid cloud integration challenge currently facing organizations is where to run the applications; dedicated infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud, a hybrid of all of these? If you ask the business how important its application is and where it should be hosted they will almost certainly… Read More »
Nicholas Dimotakis, Regional Services Director – If you are planning to internet-enable your applications, just remember they are all eventually connected to a physical infrastructure – so you need to ensure that your infrastructure is performing well. Internet-enabled applications (like all other applications) perform down to the slowest component. It is critical to ensure that the… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – May was a busy month for Virtual Instruments. Our executive, product and field teams spent time at EMC World and IBM Edge in Las Vegas where they discussed and demonstrated the value of infrastructure performance management (IPM) to national and global enterprises across industries…. Read More »
By Nick York, Product Manager, Analytics – In our ongoing detective series, we’ll investigate unexplained IT infrastructure problems and walk through the process of using infrastructure performance management to solve the mysteries. A Virtual Instruments customer planned a swap of its production and disaster recovery sites. We heavily outfitted each site with our infrastructure performance… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – Convention and conference season is in full swing, and we’re happy to report that we’re taking it all in. Most recently, we spent May 11 through May 15 at the well-attended IBM Edge at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Much like our time at… Read More »
By Barry Cooks, Senior Vice President of Products, Engineering and Support – We hear from a lot of companies that they already monitor their IT performance. They say they already know which data provides the best insights and how to find it. Now, it makes sense that IT execs and staff would have a good… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – Last week, Virtual Instruments was front and center at EMC World at The Venetian Las Vegas Casino and Resort. More than 12,000 EMC customers and 2,000 vendors and partners attended the event, which ran from May 4 to 7. As an EMC partner, we… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – We’ve all experienced that burst of frustration when we can’t access something we need online, be it because of a frozen smartphone, slow laptop or any other number of obstacles. Even when it’s less than a minute of stalled activity, our irritation grows exponentially with… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing – At Virtual Instruments, we have a simple, but effective, recruitment strategy: we go after only premium talent for every opening at our company. Appealing to the best person for a position, though, requires more than good compensation and a promising opportunity. The kind of people… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing – April saw Virtual Instruments unveil new partnerships and highlight our work with customers and partners with key appearances at major storage industry events. Here are some of our April highlights, along with some additional perspectives on industry trends. What’s happening at Virtual Instruments: Barry Cooks,… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing – Last week, we attended the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) exposition in Chicago. HIMSS brings together an entire industry of people, many of whom are focused on solving complex problems both now and in the future. A common theme in many of the… Read More »
By Barry Cooks, Senior Vice President of Products, Engineering, and Support – There’s a phase just after a critical infrastructure audit when an IT team or manager relaxes. The team has gained so much data after this in-depth examination that it seems inevitable the process would have solved some problems. That notion is incorrect. Data… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – For too many organizations, peak traffic times come with higher latency that leaves a negative impression with the end user. No one wants to wait for anything these days. So in a world where overprovisioning is always the norm but not the best solution, what’s… Read More »
By Barry Cooks, VP of Engineering – This past week I had the pleasure of speaking at the SNIA Data Storage Innovation Conference about one of my favorite industry misconceptions: the idea that all supposed IT performance metrics are created equal. Given that I work at an infrastructure performance management provider, I have a strong… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – Information technology (IT) in the federal government is, as in other industries, making the infrastructure shift to cloud. Moving highly sensitive government data and workloads to the cloud requires reliability, security and guarantees from vendors that applications and infrastructure will perform as mandated. Without these… Read More »
By Nick York, Product Manager, Analytics – Statisticians have long since moved passed raw averaging as a method for organizing and analyzing data. In some cases, it still offers a fair assessment of a dataset, but more frequently, it paints a very incomplete picture. For example, in the first few weeks of a baseball season,… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – With 40 percent of IT budgets going to infrastructure hardware, software and data centers, IT is becoming faster and more efficient, as well as more complex. The infrastructures built or improved through these investments are becoming increasingly virtualized and abstract, leaving IT managers with greater… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director, Corporate and Field Marketing – March brought new milestones for Virtual Instruments, as well as some interesting perspectives on cloud storage from the tech world. In case you missed the news, we’ve rounded up our latest announcements, along with interesting industry tidbits, for your reading pleasure. What’s happening at Virtual… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – Performance monitoring is at the heart of the modern data center. Simply throwing some resources – financial or human – at every little problem isn’t a solution anymore. IT managers are under a constant mandate to keep costs down without sacrificing an ounce of… Read More »
By Bo Barker, Vice President of Services – We’ve always been dedicated to our partners – a dedication most recently recognized by the 2015 Channel Chief designation given to John Gentry, our vice president of marketing and alliances. As a valued Virtual Instruments channel partner, you play an integral role in bringing infrastructure performance management… Read More »
By Todd Osborne, Regional Vice President of Sales – Recently, our CEO John Thompson sat down with Bloomberg to talk about our company, our goals in upcoming years and why organizations need infrastructure performance management (IPM) solutions. We wanted to share his thoughts with our customers and partners, as it succinctly illustrates our mission and strategy to… Read More »
By Bo Barker, Vice President of Services – An InformationWeek survey that looked at 2015 trends found that while 74 percent of companies expect to see increased IT demand, only 56 percent plan to increase spending. These numbers come as no surprise to those who work in the technology realm, as minimal IT spending during… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director of Product and Digital Marketing – You’ve heard the hype around flash storage. This technology has seen enormous popularity in enterprise storage because of the many benefits it provides, particularly around performance. Flash storage starts operating quickly and maintains high performance speeds throughout operation, which supports applications that need to access… Read More »
By Todd Osborne, Vice President of Sales for Asia-Pacific – Cloud is a pervasive technology, and more businesses are switching to cloud models, whether public, private or hybrid. But with this technology comes more complexity and, typically, an added layer of infrastructure that isn’t visible to IT teams. If you’re transitioning to a cloud or… Read More »
By Nicholas Dimotakis, Regional Services Director – Frustration is a common state of being in IT, especially when it comes to data security. Users are constantly in need of access to their applications and data at any time of the day and in any location. This access can frequently be mission critical. For IT professionals, meeting… Read More »
By Nicholas Dimotakis, Regional Services Director – There are a lot of parallels between the conditions needed for a successful business and those needed for a smooth-operating IT environment. In many ways, the IT department represents a microcosm of the larger business environment. In 2015, businesses – and IT teams – will rely on two important… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – We’ve had some great new developments on the news front this month. In addition to bringing new partners on board, we were recognized for our commitment to the channel with an industry award. Carahsoft leverages the VirtualWisdom4 platform for government IT Virtual Instruments announced… Read More »
By Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – Each year, CRN, a division of the Channel Company, names the top executives in channel management to its list of Channel Chiefs. Judges make selections based on experience, program innovations, channel-driven revenue and public support for the importance of IT channel sales. This year,… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – Business success today is largely driven by the efforts of the IT department. So much of what is needed to make decisions at the highest levels of the executive chain – namely, data and analytics – depends on the IT team’s ability to deliver the… Read More »
By Vikram Ramesh, Senior Director, Product and Digital Marketing – In most cases, data without context isn’t very helpful. All the data in the world doesn’t tell a story unless you know how to read it correctly, and even if you happen to have that expertise, analysis takes time. When it comes to diagnosing problem… Read More »
By Lee Jiles, Strategic Alliances – Hospitals, physicians’ offices and other healthcare organizations depend on instant access to up-to-date data. Industry regulations require that patient records be accessible all the time, but data access is about more than just compliance; it’s about delivering quality care. For this reason, the struggle healthcare IT managers face in… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – “Our business has a lot of extra money to spend. Hey, IT team, do you guys want it?” Have any of you ever heard that sentence? If so, you’re part of a very small and fortunate group. Many IT pros can attest to the fact… Read More »
By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – We recently announced a partnership with Key Information Systems, Inc. (KeyInfo) that guarantees the performance and availability of KeyInfo’s hybrid cloud offering, the KeyCloud, to enterprise customers. For cloud providers wanting to support large enterprises, the ability to promise and deliver a high level of… Read More »
Tim Stammers, Analyst at 451 Research, gave Load DynamiX a glowing review for its market domination in storage performance validation. As most of you know, 451 Research reports provide informative summaries of the company, its target markets, latest product enhancements, and competition. And don’t forget the SWOT analysis at the end – a favorite among many…. Read More »
Bo Barker, Vice President of Services – It’s no secret that modern IT operations consist of more than just keeping the blinking lights green. Reactionary IT management is part of the past, and when it comes to business operations, that’s a good thing. During my early days of IT management, it wasn’t uncommon for teams… Read More »
Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – MetLife chooses VirtualWisdom for guaranteed performance We brought another great customer into the fold this month; MetLife chose VirtualWisdom4 IPM platform to guarantee availability for its customers. As one of the largest life insurance companies in the world, MetLife can’t tolerate performance issues, making VirtualWisdom… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Director, Product & Digital Marketing – Do you ever hear the following complaints from managers and executives in your enterprise? “Our issues are being caused by slow performance.” “Can we get more out of the IT assets we own?” “How can our technology help us execute data-driven decisions in a faster way?” If… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – It’s no secret that in the technology space, some of your strongest innovations originate outside your organization. Whether you’re getting feedback from your customers that allow you to tweak your products for better performance or you’re working closely with a channel partner that has a fresh… Read More »
Take a look at this video featuring Todd Gleason, VP Technology at Firehost and find out why he is using Load DynamiX for all his storage testing needs. Storage Switzerland analyst, George Crump, asks Todd several questions about the company and their main concerns as a secure cloud hosting provider. Then the interview goes into… Read More »
Marc Staimer of Dragon Slayer Consulting published a very useful, short primer on object storage use cases. One of the points he makes is that object storage can be latency-prone. Of course, there are quite a few advantages of object, but performance isn’t one of them. Still, we have customers who are using Load DynamiX… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – When it comes to the data center, history is important. If you understand the history and evolution of data center storage, you see why performance management has broken down. Let’s take a look at the last 30 years in data center history so we can put… Read More »
Barry Cooks, Vice President of Engineering – Since some of the early IT pros first developed data storage, those same individuals have been trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. Rarely does the first (or second or third) version of a new technology perfectly hit the mark, and storage was no different. There have… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – If you’re in the financial industry, you know that there are no excuses for delays in service. Imagine if you were a stockbroker and you couldn’t access your trading platform, or if you provided banking to customers who were unable to log into their accounts. In… Read More »
Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – This week, we’re taking a look back at 2014 and remembering some milestone events. From product releases to awards and partnerships, the previous year was busy and productive from start to finish. As we move into 2015, our team is looking forward to what the… Read More »
Barry Cooks, Vice President of Engineering – In part one of this two-part series, I covered the problems that come with only measuring utilization. This post will look at the greater value that comes with measuring performance. After reading part one of this series, you know that your IT utilization metrics likely aren’t as valuable… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – For many companies in the IT industry, the channel makes integral contributions to both short- and long-term sales and revenue numbers. Organizations seeking exponential growth can benefit greatly from the efforts of their resellers, but that growth only lasts as long as the vendor-partner relationship is… Read More »
Barry Cooks, Vice President of Engineering – This installment is part one of a two-part series on the shortcomings and benefits of different metrics for IT infrastructures. In this post, I’ll look at the problems that come with only measuring utilization, and in part two, I’ll cover the greater value that comes with measuring performance…. Read More »
Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – As an IT professional, you know there’s nothing more stressful than spending days – or even weeks or months – troubleshooting and alleviating system problems that could have been prevented. While performance issues can occur at any time, with robust and holistic end-to-end monitoring and… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – Joint technology integration and solution selling has greatly benefitted enterprises in the past, as well as the vendors that offered these integrated solutions. Customers could easily vet and purchase system components as holistic converged infrastructure, knowing they’d been designed and tested to work together. In 2014,… Read More »
Barry Cooks, Vice President of Engineering – Managing a team or department is almost always a challenge to some degree, and IT teams are no exception. Especially for those new to a management role, understanding the dynamics and unique personalities among your employees can be extremely daunting. The impact of management styles on culture and… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – What happened the last time someone wrote you a check? Did you leave it in your wallet for a few months before you remembered to do something with it, or did you cash it more or less right after you got it? For most people, it’s… Read More »
Mike Moore, Chief Information Officer – When you’re making a technology solution for customers, it pays to use that solution yourself. You can see its strengths and weaknesses, and then work to build up the former while fixing the latter. In the industry, this is called “eating your own dog food”, a phrase that implies… Read More »
Barry Cooks, Vice President of Engineering – It’s no secret that within an IT department, various teams often function in siloed environments. This situation has been characteristic of the IT profession for many years, and because so many different personalities and system owners work within departments, it can result in a tendency for team members… Read More »
Barry Cooks, VP of Engineering – You might have read our previous blog post about the changing role of IT professionals and said to yourself, “Sure, the role of the IT professional has changed, but what about the technology? And how can I stay relevant enough to claim that title of strategic adviser in my business?”… Read More »
Dion Harris, Senior Manager of Product Marketing – Big data is more than just a buzz phrase. Big data analytics are bringing a whole new level of insight to industries spanning a number of verticals, including finance, logistics, sports and retail, to name a few. In the past decade, social analytics have been added to… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – In November, I spent a little more than two weeks traveling internationally at a few conferences and to our international offices. I also got to spend some time visiting with customers and partners, and while there are regional differences and nuances between the organizations in different… Read More »
Raj Patel, Senior Director of Corporate and Field Marketing – We’ve had a busy few months at Virtual Instruments and have announced great new partnerships, customer wins and interesting research findings. In case you missed any of the updates, here’s a quick recap: Nasdaq adopts VirtualWisdom for increased visibility We recently announced a new customer… Read More »
Mike Moore, Chief Information Officer – The role of the IT professional has seen dramatic pendulum swings in the past 30 years. IT teams have moved from being the end-all, be-all for everything technology to seeing IT slip away from their purview and back again. How often do you think of your IT department as just… Read More »
Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing – Most people associate December with seasonal holidays, and while we certainly don’t disagree, here at Virtual Instruments we have another reason to look forward to this final month of 2014: the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in Las Vegas. There’s a lot happening at… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – Founding an organization is not an easy endeavor; it takes work and dedication from the executive team down to drive results, especially before a company’s reputation is established. During these early years, what drives the success of great organizations is a like-mindedness of the executive team around… Read More »
John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances – IT professionals play a critical role in the success of an organization, and all too often, the environments in which they work are the product of years – even decades – of system expansions and upgrades. As IT professionals know all too well, this situation results in… Read More »
We attended the 451 Group’s Storage Summit in NYC this week and someone asked me how Load DynamiX modeling compares to using mathematical modeling for storage performance testing and in particular, doing predictive analysis. I offered a couple of observations (actually, I probably droned on far too long). But I thought more about it while… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Product Marketing Director – Today, Virtual Instruments announced the results of a research study we commissioned with Forrester Consulting to investigate the state of IT infrastructure performance management. The study was conducted to help our team better understand the challenges IT departments are facing, as well as strategies for overcoming inefficient or… Read More »
Barry Cooks, VP of Engineering – When I started to write this blog post, I titled it “Two simple rules to hiring the best in IT.” After a few paragraphs, I realized that these tips aren’t limited to just information technology careers, but are actually solid guidelines to hiring in any position. No matter the industry… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Product Marketing Director – When was the last time your company had an IT outage? If your business is anything like the majority of global enterprises, chances are you experience some degree of infrastructure downtime or poor performance on a more frequent basis than you or your IT team would like. With… Read More »
Understanding performance issues today can prevent damaging — and costly — problems tomorrow. Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Product Marketing Director – As an IT professional, you know how easy it is to get bogged down in day-to-day infrastructure management and neglect the ongoing health of your system — until you’re forced to deal with a major… Read More »
Jason Cowie, Strategic Alliances Director – The tech world has been humming this week, and Virtual Instruments has been smack in the middle of all the buzz. We are announcing today our latest partnership with EMC and Panduit, a collaboration that eliminates the need to virtualize IO-intensive workloads to gain end-to-end insight into your system…. Read More »
Raj Patel, Sr. Director, Corporate and Field Marketing – This past week, a number of our team members attended SIMposium 2014 in Denver, Colorado. The event was packed with tech-savvy execs, all with the goal of learning how they can more effectively integrate their technology skillset and strategies with the overall business models and goals of… Read More »
Aravind Sivanesan, Solutions Consulting Director, Western US – CIO/IT infrastructure owners have Service Level Agreements and objectives from their Internet Service and bandwidth providers. For example – roundtrip latency for traffic from NYC to SJC must not exceed 45ms. How can a CIO have a comparable SLA for application performance on his infrastructure? Virtual Instruments… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Product Marketing Director – Mission critical IT application delivery infrastructures are being virtualized and organizations are adopting cloud environments to help improve agility and reduce CAPEX. IT teams are leveraging old technologies that weren’t purpose-built to handle today’s complex and ever-changing infrastructure, preventing them from delivering business-aligned service levels. These IT teams… Read More »
Vikram Ramesh, Sr. Product Marketing Director – It’s no secret that doing business on a global scale has been costly and complex. That is arguably why most of the winnings of the global economy have gone to the big guys. Now you can join them by leveraging VirtualWisdom4 from Virtual Instruments, the industry’s first Infrastructure… Read More »
Dion Harris, Sr. Product Marketing Manager – My colleagues and I will be at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2014 in Orlando, Florida. The event’s theme this year is around how digital business is blurring the lines between the digital and the physical worlds, disrupting all industries and redefining the role of IT. With the advent of cloud, big data… Read More »
Eric Jorgenson, Regional VP of Sales – Anyone can build a bridge: the definition of an engineer is someone who can build a strong bridge, one fit for purpose that is not over-engineered and wasteful of resources, hence the engineering not just building. If you look at the fees charged by the architect that designs… Read More »
As Virtual Instruments is a relatively new company (established in 2008) we’re working hard to give our channel partners the tools they need to encourage customers to adopt our innovative technology and embrace a relatively new concept: Infrastructure Performance Management, or IPM. And already 30% of Fortune 100 companies are taking advantage of the benefits… Read More »
Dan Tehranian, Staff Engineer – In using Docker at Virtual Instruments, we had to setup an internal Docker Registry in order to share our custom Docker images. Setting up a basic internal Docker Registry is trivially easy, but there was one issue we hit in production-izing this app. In VI’s R&D infrastructure we run all of… Read More »
Nicholas Dimotakis, Regional Service Director, PS Management – In an increasingly complex world, the way in which we use and store data has significantly changed. A data warehouse – or a large store of data accumulated from a wide range of sources within a datacentre and often used to guide business decisions – is critical… Read More »
Dion Harris – As VMWorld 2014 closes, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on what a great few days we have had! Thank you to all of the partners, customers and new acquaintances that we had an opportunity to see and meet. VMWorld allowed the Virtual Instruments team to showcase the power of… Read More »
Nicholas Dimotakis – In this blog, I look at some of the biggest obstacles IT vendors face when dealing with customers and how at Virtual Instruments we have tailored our services to specifically address these. In today’s IT business we are faced with three major challenges as soon as ink touches paper: time, prioritisation, engagement…. Read More »
Dan Tehranian – When developing and testing a product that integrates with VMware vSphere, it can often be useful to have a vCenter to test against. Unfortunately for developers and testers, the process of setting up and managing their own vCenter instance along with the necessary entities for it to manage can be extremely time… Read More »
Nicholas Dimotakis – There’s a bit of a buzz and excitement here at Virtual Instruments as we just completed one year of operation of our newest service. Virtual Instruments Managed Services (VIMS) is a solution which provides the full capabilities of the industry-leading VirtualWisdom platform as an ongoing managed service offering, enabling customers to monitor… Read More »
Nick Isitt – There is no doubt that the ‘holy grail’ for data centers today is all about how to achieve peak performance. You don’t have to look far to notice the lively debates around the virtues and limitations of flash memory. But, what is often overlooked is the reality of today’s heterogeneous IT infrastructure… Read More »
On 15th May, at the DCS awards ceremony at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, London, Virtual Instruments was announced as the winner of the Datacentre ICT Company of the Year. The DCS awards are designed to reward the product designers, manufacturers, suppliers and providers operating in the data centre arena. The Awards recognise major achievements… Read More »
Today is a big day for Virtual Instruments, this morning we announced VirtualWisdom4 providing customers definitive insight into how their applications and infrastructure are performing. You are forced into the role of system integrator as a direct result of perpetually increasing complexity and abstraction. Virtualization, cloud-computing and “software defined” solutions are driving the “death” of… Read More »
Load DynamiX has published a performance testing methodology white paper for All-Flash-Arrays (AFAs) in collaboration with the industry’s flash leaders at the storage vendors and well-known industry analysts. The white paper can be found here Performance testing is important if you have these kinds of questions: Can I improve application performance with flash? If so,… Read More »
Sean Maxwell – The effect of virtualization on IT has so polarized the challenges of delivering real-time infrastructure performance management, that it’s time we do something about it. And when you’ve gone blind to the performance and availability of your mission-critical workload (and we all have), it’s time to under-go ‘Lasik for your Legacy’ and… Read More »
Sean Maxwell – If you work in an enterprise IT organization, and you’ve been running mission-critical applications supporting your business for the past decade, odds are that your IT infrastructure is undergoing major stages of modernization. Through the advances of virtualization, cloud, and now all the chatter about the software-defined data center, the challenge to… Read More »
Skip Bacon – On Monday, The Register published a story SPLASSHH! Tech giant IBM DIVE-BOMBS into all-flash array pool where IBM and its competitors commented on IBM’s announcement. I have to say it was quite interesting to see the vendors duke it out over their solutions. I wanted to jump into the conversation and share a perspective… Read More »
As a seasoned storage expert who’s spent plenty of time in the field, I wanted to share some insight gleaned from our customers on how flash storage performance is affected from compression and deduplication. Here are two emails that hit my inbox today: Email from customer 1: “We need to be able to control the… Read More »
‘Twas the night before peak season, and all through the data center, Not an engineer was sleeping, not even a tape operator; The SAN zones were coded in the name server with care, In hopes that SCSI transactions would soon be there; The servers were nestled all snug in their racks; While intervals of low… Read More »
John Gentry – As 2013 winds down, it’s time to prepare for the next year. And, what better way to do this than to think about what the future holds for advancements in IT. From discussions with our customers, partners and employees I’ve collected a short list of things to expect in the New Year…. Read More »
Chris James – Buying a car is a major purchase for most people and it’s easy to get carried away with the sleek lines, alloy wheels and other superficial aspects of the vehicles in the show room. However any good engineer will tell us that it’s what’s under the hood that ensures performance, safety and… Read More »
Eric Jorgensen – Over the past 50 years, data storage has changed and progressed on an unprecedented scale. Thinking back to 1956 when IBM launched the RAMAC 305, the world’s first computer with a hard disk drive, weighing one tonne and with approximately 4.4MB of memory, we can only imagine what the future might hold…. Read More »
Douglas Smith – Virtual Instruments was honored recently by CRN as a 2013 Emerging Vendor. As CRN put it “it’s not all about the technology… the vendors on this list know the value of a good partnership and have a serious commitment to the channel.” We think that describes Virtual Instruments to a tee. But… Read More »
Chris James – While for some organisations turning large volumes of data into meaningful information is a real challenge, for over half of the business population it’s really not that important. In fact, according to recent analyst reports on Big Data, just under half of worldwide businesses are looking at implementing Big Data IT infrastructure… Read More »
Alex D’Anna – More than 55 million Africans rely on small apps on their mobile phones to transfer money. In fact, mobile money accounts outnumber bank accounts in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Madagascar. Astonishingly, according to a new study by telecoms trade group GSMA, in June 2012 alone, the value of Kenya’s mobile money transactions… Read More »
Richard Brown Although initially overwhelming, Big Data offers real opportunity for customers and the channel There’s been a lot of noise around Big Data and industry analysts predict it is set to continue. But what do we mean by Big Data? There are broadly speaking two definitions of what Big Data actually means. The first… Read More »
Chris James Since I can remember, most years the news of a major threat to humankind would break and quickly spread around the world. I remember the next ice age, overpopulation, food shortages, e-coli, acid rain, the ozone hole, bird flu, swine flu and global warming, to name just a few. But so far none… Read More »
Todd Osborne We have just finished our first full quarter in the development of our APAC business, and I am very proud of what we have already accomplished. We will initially focus our efforts building the business in Australia and SE Asia, and will support customers in other markets as opportunities arise. We have built… Read More »
Chris James The 2013 Storage Awards (Storries) was an excellent opportunity to catch up with colleagues, partners and other professionals from the industry. But the highlight of the night for Virtual Instruments has to be scooping the coveted “One to Watch” award and pipping 26 other short-listers (including Microsoft, CommVault and Dell) to the winning… Read More »
Melissa Martin The Virtual Instruments team is excited to see the launch of our CEO John W. Thompson’s blog on Computerworld.com. The blog entitled “IT in 3D” explores the evolution of the IT industry and the sweeping changes in technology – in the physical, virtual and cloud elements of IT infrastructure. In his first post,… Read More »
Todd Osborne I was working with my 10 year old on math homework and somehow a discussion on multiplication led to a conversation about VI’s press release from yesterday describing our $9B market opportunity by 2015. He did some quick math in his head and without a delay figured out that we need to grow… Read More »
Melissa Martin Planning to attend EMC World May 6-9 in Las Vegas? We hope to see you there! Here’s a short list of ways you can connect with Virtual Instruments at the show. 1. Visit our booth Stop by VI’s booth #417 and check out demos of our VirtualWisdom platform. Spend some time talking with… Read More »
Don Mead It was an exciting week at the WWT Geek Day in San Francisco last week. Along with some great technical breakout sessions all the geeks got a chance to play with some really cool hardware and get their hands on some interactive demos. I had a little downtime and got a chance to… Read More »
Tom Jensen It is now the tax season in the US (the tax deadline being April 15th). This got me worrying a little bit about my income taxes, which led me to think about my IRA (Individual Retirement Account) contributions and also my checking and savings bank accounts. I was trying to figure out how… Read More »
Daniel Charlu I attended the Computerworld Premier 100 event earlier this month in Tucson, Arizona. This conference brought together over 335 accomplished and distinguished IT professionals ranging from IT directors and CIOs. The individuals were from a wide range of industries such as consumer, energy, finance and pharma and included household names such as CapitalOne,… Read More »
Raj Patel I just attended IDC’s 48th annual Business Briefing—Directions 2013 in Santa Clara, and was truly impressed with the event. In particular, the general sessions were great. The discussion about competing on the 3rd Platform (Big Data, Mobile Broadband, Social Business and Cloud Services) is insightful and exciting. When I first started paying attention… Read More »
Melissa Martin It’s been great working with the Taneja Group over the past several months on a Field Study to understand how our customers are using VirtualWisdom to monitor and troubleshoot their physical, virtual and cloud environments. Taneja Group talked to customers across several verticals – including technology, manufacturing, retail, telecom, financial services and government… Read More »
Melissa Martin We’re excited to share that our very own Todd Osborne has been recognized as a “who’s who” in channel management. CRN has named Todd to its 2013 Channel Chiefs list after crowning our first three Platinum partners, more than doubling our number of customers, and exceeding 70% of revenue from our partners within… Read More »
Melissa Martin What a great way to start work at a new company! Last Friday was my first day as a Virtual Instruments employee and today Forbes ranked VI third on its annual list of America’s Most Promising Companies – a list of 100 privately held, high-growth companies with bright futures. I joined VI because… Read More »
Daniel Charlu Imagine you’re a spectator at a pro golf tournament—watching a golfer tee-off. The goal is to drive the ball 250 yards straight and long in the center of the fairway. You see the golfer swing, squarely hit the ball, and finish with a classic follow-through. The ball flies straight, but slices right towards… Read More »
I hate passwords. Heck, I have 6 passwords to do my daily work, and they all have different restrictions and renewal intervals. Any way to reduce this is a benefit to my daily work — reducing the “friction” of doing my daily work — and gets me through my day. VirtualWisdom has it’s own passwords,… Read More »
UDCs — User-Defined Context — can be very useful for showing the actual use, or membership of a device on the SAN, or for assigning a priority for alerting and thresholds. Often, these are hand-generated, but we do have methods of creating them from other content. One customer has both: a UDC generated/converted from other… Read More »
One of Virtual Instruments’ missions is to reduce the big, messy outages that happen in our customers’ datacenters. For many sectors across the industry, we work to determine ways to catch problems early to avoid outages. Numerous competitors have analytics engines and all kinds of software to detect problems before they become outages, but they… Read More »
EMC World was last week and it was a blast for the company! I spent most of my time in the booth as I was continuously doing demos of VirtualWisdom for a crowd of current and prospective customers. I received a lot of interest and questions on how VirtualWisdom can collect info from VMware vCenter… Read More »