June 5th, 2009
Virtual Instruments launches VirtualWisdom
Mark Urdahl, CEO, and Len Rosenthal, VP Marketing, of Virtual Instruments stopped by to let me know about VirtualWisdom, a product the company launched while at EMCword. Their product is designed to help organizations moving to a virtualized environment gain insight into and manage their virtual storage infrastructure.
Here’s what Virtual Instruments has to say about VirtualWisdom
VirtualWisdom products or services provide comprehensive, real-time instrumentation and measurement that allows IT managers to optimize the performance and availability of their virtualized IT infrastructure, including VMware optimization. VirtualWisdom adds SAN I/O intelligence for VMware performance monitoring and troubleshooting, enabling administrators to better balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements and feedback of I/O performance. By indentifying VMware performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom results in significantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization and helps administrators reduce capital and operational costs promised by data center virtualization.
VMware optimization
IT organizations that are deploying data center virtualization require a set of capabilities for the real-time identification, diagnosis and prevention of application slowdowns. VMware performance bottlenecks are often driven by the heterogeneity of storage subsystems, host bus adapters (HBAs), operating systems, fabric switches, Wide Area Networks (WANs), multi-site replication, storage and tape virtualization, and the continued growth of data and bandwidth utilization. When combined with a virtual machine architecture that virtualizes applications and I/O paths, virtual infrastructure performance challenges are exacerbated. Typical Storage Resource Management (SRM) products or host-centric VMware performance monitoring tools cannot provide the sophisticated diagnosis and prevention capabilities necessary to optimize virtual infrastructure utilization. Acute VMware performance problems and outages must be diagnosed swiftly, without vendor finger pointing or time wasted in waiting for the appropriate analysis tools.
Snapshot analysis
It is clear to me that if an organization is heading down the path to a more virtualized environment in which access, applications and processing are all items living in a virtual world that provides availability, reliability, scaleability and the like, that organization must also look into virtualizing the network and storage access as well. A workload that has been moved from one system to another to maximize system utilization, meet service level objectives or deal with outages must still be seen as the same system by network partners and must still be able to access storage.
Virtual Instuments has taken its deep expertise in SAN environments and developed a hardware/software product that would allow IT administrators to gain important insights about the operation of the storage subsystem in a virtual environent. This would most certainly make it easier to do root cause analysis when something goes wrong.
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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