BMO Financial Group Deploys Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom

Virtual Instruments announced the deployment of VirtualWisdom hardware and software within BMO Financial Group, a diversified financial services organisation headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

VirtualWisdom enables companies to adopt SAN optimisation best practices to improve the efficiency of their IT staff and to extract critical data about their IT infrastructure to proactively avoid application outages.
 
Established more than 100 years ago as the Bank of Montreal, BMO Financial Group serves more than 12 million personal, commercial, corporate and institutional customers in North America and internationally.

"We wanted to ensure our customers receive the best possible service from BMO’s financial applications," said Brad Dart, SAN Technical Specialist, Performance & Capacity Management, BMO Financial Group. "By implementing advanced monitoring solutions, we can proactively pinpoint and prevent performance issues from affecting our customers."
 
Virtual Instruments began the relationship with the financial services leader via a professional services engagement. A VirtualWisdom Portable Assessment Kit (PAK) was deployed and critical storage links were tapped using SANInsight fibre-optic TAP Patch Panels to perform a detailed SAN Health Audit. Virtual Instruments often finds that storage-related outages and performance degradations are not caused by a single issue, but are the result of multiple, seemingly unrelated issues in the environment. The net result is the SAN infrastructure, running in a vulnerable state, is not able to cope with the inevitable additional issues and the added complexity of virtualisation technologies, resulting in brown-outs. Through the engagement with Virtual Instruments, IT personnel learn best practices related to identifying risk areas and preventing business-impacting outages.
 
Shortly after the services engagement, BMO deployed the full Virtual Instruments optimisation platform, including hardware and software probes, to complement their existing EMC storage management tools.
 
"I’ve never before been part of an implementation of this magnitude that happened so efficiently," said Mr. Dart. "VirtualWisdom has given us the capability to monitor our critical IT infrastructure in real-time through a series of easy to use dashboards and alerts. It’s saving us time and money by accelerating problem identification and resolution."
 
"BMO Financial Group is setting an example for the industry with their complete dedication to customer service," said Sean Maxwell, VP of sales for Virtual Instruments. "We are excited to play a critical role in improving both the operating efficiency of their IT organisation and in helping them achieve their goal of a being the bank that defines great customer experience."
 
About VirtualWisdom
Through real-time instrumentation, VirtualWisdom 3.0 adds SAN I/O intelligence to VMware environments, enabling administrators to balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements of I/O performance. By identifying performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom 3.0 provides higher virtual infrastructure utilisation, allowing for delivery on the promise of the reduced capital and operational costs of data centre virtualisation.
 
About SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System
The system integrates fibre optic network traffic access points (TAPs) with fibre patch components to make FC SAN cabling infrastructure both maintainable and monitorable. TAPs transparently provide a passive, out-of-band, full-line rate copy of all FC SAN traffic to advanced monitoring and diagnostic equipment, including industry-standard protocol analysers and Virtual Instruments’ SAN Performance Probe real-time monitoring devices.