CloudPhysics Storage Analytics With Smart Alerts

CloudPhysics Inc., who provides predictive analytics for virtual datacenter management, announced the availability of Storage Analytics, new capabilities in the company’s product that make it possible for IT teams to pinpoint and preempt storage-induced capacity and performance problems with data-driven, actionable insight.

As a part of this release, CloudPhysics is introducing Smart Alerts, a new feature that shifts the focus of alerting from reactive to predictive. Using big data analytics, it leverages insights from its global dataset to predict capacity or performance problems in a customer’s datacenter, triggering a Smart Alert containing recommendations for preemptive actions.

Storage Causes Chronic Pain in the Virtual Datacenter
“IT ops teams managing virtualized infrastructures face a continuous onslaught of allegations that something is slow and that it is their fault. It turns out in more than 90% of the cases where the infrastructure actually is at fault, the culprit is storage,” said Bernd Harzog, analyst, The Virtualization Practice.

Virtualization transformed IT operations through resource abstraction and workload consolidation. But this abstraction makes IT operations more complex and highly opaque, particularly where virtualization and storage meet. It is now more difficult to understand how things work together, requiring admins to pull, collate and correlate data from several different layers to make operational decisions.

“Storage continues to be an extremely painful resource to manage in virtual environments, and the tools available today fail to provide the visibility, much less the intelligence, to help IT fully understand and easily control its most expensive datacenter resource,” said John Blumenthal, co-founder and CEO, CloudPhysics. “With our new release, we’ve doubled down on storage, providing storage-focused analytics that cut through the layers of complexity and provide answers IT teams need to prevent storage-induced downtime, optimize capacity and keep their virtual datacenters healthy and operating with Google-like operational efficiency.”

Storage Analytics with Smart Alerts
Enables Predictive, Proactive Management of Storage Resources
Using its global dataset, CloudPhysics examines metadata and trends from thousands of datacenters and bakes these learnings into the Storage Analytics. These high-resolution performance and capacity analytics run across a customer’s entire virtual infrastructure, evaluating the configuration and behavior of storage resources at the datastore, VM and guest level; highlighting potential trouble spots; and pushing recommendations for preventive actions.

With Storage Analytics, IT ops can:

• Diagnose storage performance culprits, reducing by 10x the amount of time it takes to find and fix problems
• Pre-empt storage-induced performance and capacity disruptions, helping eliminate storage-related downtime, which accounts for 58% of datacenter downtime overall
• Proactively manage datastores with deep health checks, ensuring proper setup and preventing waste
• Determine the efficacy of SSD caching on virtual workloads prior to making a purchase
• Create custom storage analytics and reporting for interactive exploration, root cause analysis, and ongoing management

Smart Alerts: Data-Driven Early Warning System
Storage Analytics release introduces CloudPhysics’ Smart Alerts. Other virtualization management products trigger alerts based on a ‘dumb,’ often arbitrary number or static threshold, creating significant noise about events that have already taken place. In contrast, Smart Alerts are analytics-driven and change the focus from reactive to preemptive troubleshooting. CloudPhysics evaluates all objects in the virtual datacenter against certain criteria (e.g., latency, duration, outstanding IOs, IO/s, etc.) and triggers Smart Alerts based on thresholds derived dynamically from patterns and trends observed across our global dataset. As a result, users know ahead of time when conditions are degrading and why it matters, and receive recommendations for preemptive measures to take.

“Admins have become inured to the hyperactive alerting and false positives generated by monitoring and management tools available today,” said Irfan Ahmad, CloudPhysics co-founder and CTO. “Instead of looking in the rear-view mirror, CloudPhysics uses big data to generate truly meaningful alerts that help organizations get ahead of impending disruption. We’re excited to introduce our first Smart Alerts with this release and look forward to rolling out even more functionality in the coming months.”

“As an early adopter and leader in the use of virtualization, Sanofi is focused on continuous operational improvement across our three primary datacenters in the US, APAC and Europe. The insights we gain from CloudPhysics are key in our efforts to reduce infrastructure variances across environments and improve operational predictability,” said Joachim Heppner, head of virtualization engineering services, Sanofi, in the healthcare industry. “CloudPhysics’ ease of deployment provides a tremendous cost and time advantage; because it’s SaaS, we were able to achieve visibility into our datacenters in just minutes, not the months it takes to deploy on-premise tools.“

“Datacenter outages aren’t tolerated in financial environments,” said Ryan Conley, systems administrator II, Thiel Capital, a privately-held investment management firm. “CloudPhysics has enabled us to identify and monitor potential problems ahead of time in our virtual infrastructure, which has allowed us to take the necessary actions to avoid the cost and pains of unexpected downtime.“

“As a leading Australian IaaS, ZettaGrid delivers enterprise-grade services our customers rely on to run their businesses. In turn, we rely on CloudPhysics to help protect us – and our customers – from operational hazards that can disrupt operations,” said Anthony Spiteri, ZettaGrid Pty Ltd‘s lead infrastructure architect. “Whether we’re troubleshooting performance, tackling capacity problems or addressing myriad other blips in our ever-evolving virtual infrastructure, CloudPhysics provides powerful analytics that cut through the complexity and pinpoint potential trouble spots, enabling us to proactively resolve them.“

CloudPhysics’ solution is SaaS-based and available for vSphere environments in two editions: Premium and Community. Premium Edition is available on an annual subscription basis ($895); a free trial is available for 30 days. Community Edition is free.