Virtual Instruments Introduces Infrastructure Performance Monitoring Solution for NAS

Virtual Instruments, Inc. announced VirtualWisdom5 and the VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe.

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VirtualWisdom5 is an vendor-independent cross-domain infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics solution with visibility into both SAN and NAS environments. It offers access to real-time wire data and actionable analytics to ensure performance and availability for mission-critical applications across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Enhancements to VirtualWisdom5 include:

• Support for the NAS Performance Probe for NFSv3 environments.

• Enhancements to the user interface for an improved look and feel, including a dark theme for easier viewing and side bar navigation that takes advantage of wide screen resolution.

• Enhancements to the Seasonal Trend analytic that builds upon the VirtualWisdom 4.4 capability to analyse business behavior of any application workload and detect deviations from normal. In 5.0 customers can now alert to deviations from normal behavior for every application workload, physical or virtual server, network switch, or storage array.

• A workload analytic that enables the capture of production workload behaviour. Through integration with Load DynamiX Enterprise, it creates workload models that can be used to test, load and validate proposed storage environments and changes in the lab.

• Greater than 10X speedup in SAN fabric discovery; scalable to very large fabrics with tens of thousands of active ports.

NAS Performance Probe key features:

• Simultaneous monitoring of up to 16 ports, packaged in a 2RU chassis

• Full duplex monitoring at 10Gb Ethernet line rate with optical connectivity

• Support for NFS v3 environments, followed by SMB3 support in Q1 2017

• Support for real-time monitoring of all NAS vendor products supporting NFSv3

• Support for link aggregation

IT organisations are expected to deliver increased agility and infrastructure performance, while dealing with rapidly changing application workloads underpinned by accelerating data centre complexity. Complexity is increasing everywhere in today’s data centre. IT teams need to balance the demands of maximising performance and availability while minimising costs. By providing domain experience across all platforms and applications, VirtualWisdom5 enables proactive management of performance challenges with visibility spanning from the VM to the file system and LUN, which is crucial to an enterprise’s ability to stay competitive in today’s fast-moving business environment.

For many years and in hundreds of large enterprises, the VirtualWisdom platform has been the standard for performance monitoring for FC SAN infrastructure, and it is now addressing the $6 billion market ⁽¹⁾ for NAS-based storage infrastructure. NAS environments struggle with many performance issues such as rogue clients and noisy neighbours that impact overall performance. They have lacked a viable solution that provides both SLA enforcement and intelligent analytics to identify underlying root causes. Customers can rely on the benefits and capabilities for their NAS infrastructure in the same way they rely on Virtual Instruments to manage their SAN environments. This includes NAS performance SLAs made possible by the capture of latency and I/O size data at the granularity of every read and write operation that traverses the network.

“The consistent performance of enterprise applications is essential to ensure critical business operations are carried out smoothly and with minimal risk. This has created a need to ensure that performance monitoring can be carried out at all levels of the infrastructure. As IT infrastructure becomes more complex, often including applications and services running in hybrid data centres, the inclusion of robust performance analytics covering the entire I/O path, including both SAN and NAS environments, will help ensure applications perform effectively and cost-efficiently,” said Tony Lock, analyst, Freeform Dynamics Ltd.

The VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe is a line-rate NFS monitoring device for the real-time analysis of wire data and correlation across compute, network and storage at an unprecedented level of granularity. VirtualWisdom5 combines agentless collection of physical and VM data with wire data from purpose-built out-of-band hardware probes. It collects, correlates and analyses a breadth and depth of data, enabling enterprises to avoid problems and maximise the utilisation of their critical infrastructure assets.

“Virtual Instruments provides customers with a single source of truth across their hybrid data centre, increasing staff productivity and business efficiency,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO, Virtual Instruments. “As an easy-to-use, single pane of glass monitoring platform, VirtualWisdom5 enables our customers to control costs, optimise their heterogeneous infrastructure and ultimately improve application performance.“

⁽¹⁾ IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Forecast, December 2015