Storage Lens From Start-Up Hyper9

For companies with a virtualized infrastructure, having a single view of storage resources across multiple IT silos is critical to optimizing the performance, capacity and configuration of virtual components used to support key business processes. To deliver this functionality, Hyper9, Inc., the enterprise-class virtualization management company, announced its Storage Lens that provides deep visibility across shared storage resources, including Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and NFS-based datastores, as well as a wealth of best practices for proactive monitoring of the health of the storage infrastructure.

“Understanding the capacity and performance of storage infrastructures has become more challenging as companies employ virtualization to deliver more strategic services and applications,” said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst at Taneja Group. “Too often, IT can’t tell where resources might be over-capacity or in contention with one another until it’s too late and users start complaining. Hyper9’s Storage Lens helps enterprises anticipate and avoid these problems before they translate into more costly, disruptive business issues.”

Storage Lens provides a single, consolidated management view into multiple storage resources to help administrators troubleshoot potential I/O (input/output) contention issues across myriad IT systems – especially NFS datastores that have become increasingly pervasive in VMware implementations.

Key features include:

• Actionable Storage Insights & Analysis – Provide detailed storage metrics such as latency, throughput and IOPS (input/output operations per second) across all storage types at the VM, host, cluster and datastore level.
• Performance Analyzer – Detects and isolates storage-related performance problems such as the top VMs for IOPS, throughput and read/write latency; the top VMs generating the most I/O load on a specific datastore; and the top VMs generating the most I/O load related to a specific application.
• Storage-Critical Alerts – Provide proactive monitoring for storage I/O health and capacity issues, such as high datastore latency, cluster storage utilization, datastore over-allocation (thin provisioning), host partition-free space and capacity exhaustion.
• Storage Trends – Track metrics over time such as storage used by clusters, hosts, VM and datastores; and project capacity needs to balance VM placement and datastore decisions related to fluctuations in I/O demand.
• Storage Searches/Reports – Provide current status comparisons to configuration best practices such as which VMs are using more than one datastore, VMs using old and large snapshots, VMs using RDM (Raw Device Mapping), VMs spanning multiple disks, thin-provisioned VMs and more.
• Dependency Mapping – Demonstrates how the virtual infrastructure and the applications it supports relate to existing storage resources, and which applications may be affected by a specific datastore I/O contention issue.

“Ensuring the stability of your storage infrastructure is a critical step in achieving a fully-optimized virtualization strategy,” said Bill Kennedy, CEO at Hyper9. “Hyper9’s Storage Lens is one of the few virtualization management solutions to provide a consolidated view of shared storage resources across diverse IT systems. This helps admins understand how potential storage I/O contention issues impact real-world business processes and applications, not just the infrastructure in the back of some datacenter.”