Virtual Instruments Partners With Onpath Technologies

Virtual Instruments introduced its SANInsight 8GFC Rover, an enterprise physical layer switch to support 2, 4 and 8G FC networks.

In collaboration with partner ONPATH Technologies, the new device provides capabilities that extend the accessibility of the VirtualWisdom solution in enterprise SANs and reduce the cost of virtual infrastructure performance, utilisation, and availability monitoring.

To reduce the cost of real-time monitoring for 8Gb FC SANs, Virtual Instruments and ONPATH Technologies collaborated to develop the new SANInsight 8GFC Rover, which features 2, 4 and 8Gb FC SAN support, and a scalable, software configurable architecture.

The number and connection configurations of SAN links to be monitored and the line rate of each SAN link can be managed remotely via the VirtualWisdom software, without the need for hardware changes or disruptive reconfigurations. This enables enterprise customers to expand their real-time monitoring deployments, maximising the number of SAN links monitored by a VirtualWisdom SAN Performance Probe.

The joint collaboration between ONPATH Technologies and Virtual Instruments included both hardware and software integration from both sides, creating an offering that is optimised around the VirtualWisdom solution at a low-cost for 8Gb FC SANs deployed within the virtualised data centre and private clouds.

"As companies move their business-critical applications to a private or hybrid cloud, real-time monitoring of the physical and virtual infrastructure is becoming essential to ensuring the performance, utilisation, and availability of this new complex IT environment," said William ‘Skip’ Bacon, CTO of Virtual Instruments. "Our partnership with ONPATH Technologies has enabled us to develop a cost-effective solution that addresses the key pain points IT managers are feeling now, with the flexibility to support future data centre growth."

"Private cloud infrastructures are mission-critical, and data centre managers must architect their infrastructure to provide continuous actionable data on performance, utilisation, and the potential risks to ensure SLA adherence," said Brian McCann, CEO ONPATH Technologies. "The SANInsight 8GFC Rover solution we’ve developed together – combining VirtualWisdom’s monitoring and analysis capabilities and ONPATH’s innovative physical layer switching architecture – will help Global 2000 businesses maximise application performance and availability as they deploy within a private cloud."
 
SANInsight 8GFC Rover
The SANInsight 8Gb Rover is a software-controlled physical layer switch, automated by the VirtualWisdom Server to share SAN Performance Probes and Protocol Analysers across SAN links. The Rover is connected to the SAN through Virtual Instrument’s Traffic Access Points (TAPs), which are inserted into the SAN link to non-intrusively split a portion of the optical power from the SAN link to the Rover to enable out-of-band access for monitoring and diagnostics. The Rover enables time- and event-based sharing of Probes and Analysers across Roving Groups of SAN Links. To best align monitoring capacity with operational needs, SAN administrators can create a tiered SAN monitoring architecture by varying the duration of the metric collection interval and number of SAN links in the Roving Group for each SAN Performance Probe.