Start-Up’s Profile: Virtual Instruments
In SAN and VMware performance and optimization with software and hardware
By Jean Jacques Maleval | November 4, 2010 at 3:00 pmCompany
Virtual Instruments
Headquarters
Scotts Valley, CA
Founded in
June 2008 through a private equity spinâ€?out from Finisar that created NetWisdom, precursor to VirtualWisdom. [Finisar’ SAN monitoring and testing business was sold at this time to an investment group of storage and software veterans, led by Mark Urdahl, former IBM executive who co-founded the Fibre Channel Systems Initiative, Jim Davidson, founding partner of Silver Lake Partners, and Steve Mankoff, former senior executive at Siebel Systems, with Finisar retaining a minority stake in the spin-off.]
Financial funding
By "very well known" individual investors including John Thompson, and VCs that include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Next World Capital and Riverwood Capital
Revenues and profitability
"Under $$50 million and roughly break-even", according to Len Rosenthal; the company stated recently to have doubled revenues in 2H10, compared to 1H09
Main executives
- John W. Thompson, CEO: since June 2010, after 28-year career with IBM lastly as GM of Americas, then moving on to become Symantec’s CEO in 1999 and retiring on April, 2009; member of the boards of Seagate and UPS; part owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors
- Dennis Morrison, CFO: spent four years as CFO and VP ops for InterSAN
- Len Rosenthal, VP marketing: most recently, CMO at Panasas, previously at QLogic, PathScale, Inktomi, SGI and HP
- Bo Barker, VP services: was area technology consulting director of EMC global services
- Skip Bacon, CTO
- Barry Cooks, VP engineering: formerly senior director of R&D at VMware
- Sean Maxwell, VP sales: coming from EMC where he was area VP of sales, after stints at QLogic and McData/CNT (now Brocade)
- Eileen Murphy, VP ops: working also previously at InterSAN
Number of employees
80
Technology
Tracking the I/O conversations across the SAN infrastructure – not NAS or IP – to provide real time monitoring and trend analysis of the performance between enterprise applications, VMware virtual machines, and the FC SAN.
Products
VirtualWisdom software and SANInsight hardware:
- VirtualWisdom for performance monitoring and SAN troubleshooting with two products, ProbeV, a virtual software probe that collects status from SAN switches via SNMP, and ProbeVM here from VMware ESX virtual machines, physical servers and clusters
- SANInsight Fiber TAP (Traffic Access Points) patch panel system complements VirtualWisdom by analyzing FC frames. TAP uses a passive fibre optic splitter to create a out-of-band copy of the light signal passing through it, without traffic overhead.
Price
- Starting at $15,000 for VirtualWisdom software only
- Starting at $100,000 for VirtualWisdom and SANInsight
Roadmap
SRM for FCoE next year
Alliance Partners
EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, VMware
Distributors
Selling mostly directly, channel partners include Advanced Systems Group (USA), Dallas Digital Services (USA) Dell (USA), FCN (USA), LB Systems (Austria), MEN@NET (Germany), Spusht (UAE), Vion (USA-Federal) and recently Virtue (France)
OEMs
Dell, HDS
Number of customers
Under 100
Main customers
Biggest one Unilever in UK, and also BarclayCard, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Groupama Asset Management
Comments
SRM never was a sufficient lucrative market by itself even if several start-ups try
to enter into this field. One of the difficulty is to recognize
each devices on the storage network as there is no real global standardization, and
consequently being obliged to add pieces of software for each new FC components.
Here VirtualWisdom can analyze directly FC frames independently of the
devices and then give advices to high-end FC customers about the
performance or VMware bottlenecks in their SAN. The know-how of Finisar,
specialized in FC monitoring and testing helped. After that, you have to fix the I/O problems.
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