Virtual Instruments Revealed Next Gen of VirtualWisdom Hybrid Infrastructure Management Platform

Virtual Instruments, Inc. introduced the next generation of VirtualWisdom, a hybrid infrastructure management and AIO/s platform.

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By visualizing the infrastructure in the context of the application, VirtualWisdom 6.0 enables organizations to proactively gain full control over the performance and availability of the applications across their modern hybrid data centers. In doing so, VirtualWisdom delivers improved control, business agility and reduced infrastructure costs. Furthermore, it brings an end to the costly, unproductive and antiquated ‘IT war rooms’ typically created to resolve critical application slowdowns and outages.

Today’s enterprises are increasingly evolving to a hybrid data center model in order to utilize cost-effective and flexible compute and storage via the cloud, while retaining the control and security provided by on-premises infrastructure. However, the reality is that the scale and complexity associated with these highly virtualized, hybrid and multi-cloud environments is beyond human comprehension. In attempts to navigate this complexity, enterprises often implement monitoring tools in a siloed fashion, resulting in an incomplete view of the health, utilization, capacity and performance of the underlying infrastructure supporting the business-critical applications. This fragmented visibility leads to a lack of control over application delivery, which results in poor business performance in the form of unmet SLAs, reactive IT, and unconstructive, silo-centric finger-pointing within IT war rooms.

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This release of VirtualWisdom eliminates these obstacles by holistically monitoring, analyzing and optimizing the health, utilization, capacity and performance of IT infrastructure within the context of the application. It discovers and maps applications to the infrastructure to understand where each application lives and how it behaves on top of the infrastructure, in addition to discerning the business value and SLA tier of each application. Once this end-to-end visibility is established, VirtualWisdom then applies real-time, AI-based analytics that include machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems, allowing enterprises to ensure the performance and availability of the mission-critical applications across their highly complex hybrid data centers.

By leveraging the company’ scalable wire and machine data instrumentation and app-centric analytics, the VirtualWisdom 6.0 platform delivers four key capabilities: Application service assurance; predictive capacity management; workload infrastructure balancing; and problem resolution and avoidance. These complementary capabilities enable organizations to proactively identify and resolve infrastructure-related performance, capacity and utilization issues that are impacting business-critical applications, which removes the need for costly reactive firefighting that is the hallmark of traditional IT war rooms.

“The emerging hybrid IT environment demands a new approach to infrastructure monitoring. AI-driven, analytics-based solutions that can visualize and analyze the infrastructure across all domains in the context of the application are becoming essential to performance and availability assurance – and are eliminating the need for war rooms,” said Bob Laliberte, practice director and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The new generation of the VirtualWisdom hybrid infrastructure management platform will help IT management avoid the war room with a unique, comprehensive and real-time approach to proactive monitoring and AIO/s that spans the on-premise data center to both private and public clouds.“

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Key features of VirtualWisdom include:

• Updated dashboards that integrate proactive analytics, with new visualizations and configuration data that:

• Identify workload balancing opportunities and display the recommendations directly on any dashboard

• Deliver inventory status charts to provide ‘at-a-glance’ control of deployed infrastructure configuration

• Provide the ability to annotate dashboards with embedded images and text through the freeform card

• Enhancements to trend matcher, the AI-based cross-silo correlation analytic. The AI-based correlation is app-centric and topology-aware, which overlays correlation directly onto the topology map – making it easier to understand the impact of infrastructure issues across all silos

• Application-centric topology enables understanding of the complete the end-to-end path of applications from compute to storage

• Correlation of native application and infrastructure discovery with Dynatrace, in addition to existing correlation with AppDynamics, ServiceNOW, VMware vApps, Netflow and host discovery

• Ability to rapidly correlate the impacts of end-user response time to infrastructure performance through enhanced event integration with ppDynamics

• OS Integration provides agentless collection of OS level metrics from either Linux or Windows hosts across cloud, virtual, and physical instances

• OS Integration support for Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platforms

• iSCSI wire data monitoring support in the NAS Performance Probe, which complements existing NFS and SMB monitoring capabilities

• Storage integrations to monitor the health, performance and capacity of Dell/EMC’s VMAX/PowerMAX and IBM’s SVC, including the abilities to balance workloads and reclaim capacity

• Predictive capacity management, which helps an enterprise optimize its infrastructure capacity; identify capacity exhaustion risks; and proactively recover unused capacity by:

  • • Predicting and optimizing infrastructure capacity

    • Planning and optimizing the deployment of new infrastructure

    • Monitoring and forecasting capacity consumption rates

    • Helping avoid capacity exhaustion

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“As the complexity of our data center continued to grow exponentially, we faced the risk of becoming reactive to infrastructure and application issues – rather than proactively addressing them,” said Jon Phillips, team manager, enterprise storage and SAN, University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston (UTHealth). “With the new VirtualWisdom and its AIO/s capabilities, we will gain full visibility into the performance, capacity, health and utilization of our mission-critical applications and the underlying infrastructure. As a result, we will be able to take a proactive approach to assuring the availability and performance of our critical apps and services. This not only helps ensure a stellar user experience, but also enables us to avoid unproductive and resource-intensive troubleshooting sessions in our IT war room.“

“Most enterprises face an uphill battle in trying to proactively manage and automate their hybrid data centers because their organizations have been built in a siloed approach using legacy monitoring technologies,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO, Virtual Instruments. “As a result, when a business-critical application experiences a problem that cannot be immediately remediated, the enterprise retreats to the IT war room to begin an expensive, inefficient and contentious trouble-shooting process. The new VirtualWisdom platform ends the need for IT war rooms by helping our customers collaborate via a shared context across the entire infrastructure stack in the context of each application. This enables the enterprise to gain control of application service delivery and restore enterprise IT’s ability to move the business forward and innovate.“

VirtualWisdom 6.0 is available on October 31, 2018 and will be showcased and available for demo at the NetApp Insight conference, taking place in Las Vegas, NV, from October 22-24.