June 16th, 2009
Virtual Instruments customer profile
I always enjoy the opportunity to communicate with a representative of a company using technology to counter balance discussions I have with the suppliers of that technology. On some occasions, the company does not want its name mentioned. This commentary on Virtual Instruments’ NetWisdom is a case in point. I had the opportunity to communicate with the SAN manager of a financial services organization from the UK.
Please introduce your organization and describe your role
My organization is responsible for the complete information technology life-cycle (design, implement, maintain, troubleshoot, retire)for all distributed technology used to operate the infrastructure at my company, a leading global financial institution. We are measured on our effectiveness in providing solid, cost effect solutions to achieve our business needs. My role within this organization is to manage all aspects of shared storage operations. I am responsible for providing scalable, flexible, cost effective solutions to meet the voracious appetite for storage and storage solutions. I am measured by the decisions I make in attempting to steer our storage solutions around pitfalls and headaches.
What are you doing that needed this technology?
My company, by and large, grew up consolidated. From the beginning we were running multiple OSes on a few large machines (IBM VIOs). As the company grew, so did the appetite for resources from these OSes. The challenge for us was to stay ahead of the curve, and predict when an OS would need to be pulled off the shared platform, and given more horsepower. My challenge in particular was to monitor storage use (bandwidth, IOPS, disk, etc) and ensure that it was never the bottleneck. Virtual Instruments NetWisdom has given me the data-points I needed to make these types of decisions with ease. It also allows me to squeak out performance on heavily taxed systems. It does so by giving me real-time and historical performance metrics.
What products did you consider?
I first attempted to solve the ‘performance monitoring’ issue by using EMC’s WLA (Workload Analyzer). This is a solution that feels like an afterthought. EMC may have decent storage solutions, but the software they’ve developed over the years to monitor performance has always been given a smaller budget. WLA was not able to easily give me the metrics I was looking for. I also looked at (what was) Onaro’s SanScreen. I brought this into my shop as a POC, and was immediately disappointed in the lack of granularity is could provide for user experiences. (Side note, I ended up buying SanScreen in that it filled a large capacity planning gap and a large auditing gap)
Why did you select this product?
Virtual Instruments’ NetWisdom was the only product I found to give me an overwhelming amount of data to base my decisions on, as well as help me troubleshoot performance issues. Though initially rough around the edges (it’s not the prettiest application; the best stuff rarely is), NetWisdom clearly provided raw data and polished graphing utilities to help me solve my problems.
What tangible benefits has your organization gotten through the use of this product?
My organization has used NetWisdom to solve countless issues. Each issue has more than paid for its purchase. We’ve used it to troubleshoot a large data warehouse performance issue, troubleshoot an SRDF replication issue, POC a dedupe solution’s marketing claims, test various configurations settings for a new OS platform, find quiet times for optimal backups, and even used it to troubleshoot failing SFP issues.
I could list more and more, but thought I’d touch on one to illustrate how thorough this product is.
My backup administrator was complaining that his level zero backups of a particular system were taking a long time to complete. He had consulted with the application owner and they had determined that the best time to run a backup would be after 7pm and before 2am. Users typically would leave around 5:30-6pm, and a batch processing schedule would kick off around 2am. Any extra disk activity between 7pm and 2am should not face any contention for disk IO.
After using NetWisdom, we learned that the quiet time was from 11pm-6am. It turned out that users were queuing up one final command, hitting enter, and leaving for the day. This increased load would run until about 10:30pm. Batch processing, as it turns out, was relatively light on the disks themselves. The backup administrator was able to reduce his backup window by sliding the backup times into the quiet disk periods.
• What advice would you offer others?
Virtual Instruments’ NetWisdom is a must in any SAN. There are metrics gathered and Data stored by NetWisdom that other groups already take for granted. NetWisdom has given me the ability to go toe-to-toe with these other groups during root cause analysis sessions. My only regret is not installing it sooner, as its historical data and trending ability would have greatly improved my quarterly capacity review session
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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