PernixData: New Architect Platform

PernixData, Inc. announced a new software platform, Architect, for application-centric design, deployment, operations and optimization of storage in virtualized data centers.

Architect is a solution to provide real-time analytics for all virtualized applications and storage devices, irrespective of underlying hardware. This is combined with intuitive dashboards and proactive design recommendations to prevent application problems before they arise, eliminate unnecessary storage overprovisioning costs, and streamline IT operations costs by avoiding reactive troubleshooting.

“Application and infrastructure management in today’s data centers is totally broken,” said Satyam Vaghani, PernixData CTO and co-founder. “CIOs, CTOs, and infrastructure architects seldom have the right data to proactively design data centers to meet existing and future needs, and they lack the right tools to understand why problems exist when they arise. This has created a very reactive approach to IT management that wastes money and resources and puts strategic projects in jeopardy due to poor application performance. This all changes with Architect, a hardware agnostic platform that marries VM and storage intelligence with real-time analytics to holistically manage the entire IT lifecycle, from design and deployment to operations and ongoing optimization.“

“Most IT administrators would love to have a single pane of glass that they can log into every morning to get visibility into their ever changing application and storage environments,” said Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, ESG. “PernixData Architect is ideally suited to actually deliver that functionality; because it sits inside the hypervisor, it can collect an enormous amount of useful application and infrastructure data, and provide invaluable recommendations on how best to design a virtualized data center.”

Features of Architect include:

• Turn big data into big knowledge. Architect continuously generates new data based on dynamic VM and infrastructure conditions and correlates it with third party information to ensure that decisions are constantly made using the most accurate and pertinent information.
• Real-time analytics. Architect provides real-time descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics for optimal storage and VM design. For example, you can easily identify which VMs are performing poorly and why. You can best configure block sizes and R/W patterns to support an upcoming application rollout or upgrade. And you can accurately size your storage arrays based on constantly changing application requirements, avoiding expensive hardware overprovisioning costs.
• User experience. From a single pane of glass you get a view across all of your data centers, with all pertinent application and storage details at your fingertips. Ad-hoc analytics, such as drilldowns and pivot tables, are available on the fly for more detailed analysis and reporting.
• Hardware agnostic. Architect is a 100% software solution that is installed in minutes inside the hypervisor kernel, making it compatible with all hardware on VMware’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). No changes are required to existing VMs, servers or storage.

Deployment and Availability
Architect can be deployed with or without PernixData FVP software, the premier platform for server-side storage acceleration.

As a standalone platform, Architect provides all of the design and management functions listed above for any server and storage platform.

When FVP is deployed with Architect, you get even more functionality. In addition to providing visibility into VM and storage behavior, you have an integrated platform for maximizing the performance of those environments.

PernixData Architect will be available in 4Q015.