The Virtualization Practice

VirtualWisdom products and services provide comprehensive, real-time instrumentation and measurement that allows IT managers to optimize the performance, utilization, and availability of their SAN and virtualized IT infrastructure, including private clouds. It enables greater use of VMware virtualization for mission-critical applications, and drastically reduces the effort required to troubleshoot and optimize SANs.

For SAN managers, VirtualWisdom provides comprehensive instrumentation and Storage Area Network (SAN) I/O measurement capabilities that reduce application response time, increase availability, and improve resource utilization. VirtualWisdom, as the successor to the NetWisdom SAN I/O solution, is the leading SAN monitoring and performance optimization product. VirtualWisdom is the only product that can non-intrusively improve the performance of applications and increase the benefi ts of storage virtualization in real time by analyzing actual SAN I/O traffic data.

For VMware managers, VirtualWisdom adds SAN I/O intelligence for comprehensive VMware performance optimization and troubleshooting, enabling a more balanced deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements and feedback of I/O performance. By indentifying
virtualized application performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom results in signifi cantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization and helps administrators deliver on the promise of reduced capital and operational costs promised by server virtualization.

Virtual Wisdom Business Benefits

For VMware managers, VirtualWisdom adds SAN I/O intelligence for comprehensive VMware performance optimization and troubleshooting, enabling a more balanced deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements and feedback of I/O performance. By indentifying
virtualized application performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom results in signifi cantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization and helps administrators deliver on the promise of reduced capital and operational costs promised by server virtualization.

1. Operational (OpEx) savings through improved operations

VirtualWisdom is the best solution to help IT identify and troubleshoot I/O problems. VirtualWisdom helps IT dramatically minimize the time to problem identification and resolution, reduces the number of trouble tickets, and allows SAN and VMware administrators to spend more time focused on solving business challenges and implementing revenue-generating initiatives. By reducing over-provisioning of resources, IT can significantly reduce maintenance fees and improve overall reliability of the IT infrastructure. VirtualWisdom helps avoid unnecessary SAN switch and storage expenditures, thereby reducing power, cooling, floor space, and administration expenses, and helps increase the ratio of VMs to physical servers.

2. Capital expenditure (CapEx) savings by eliminating over-provisioning and over-tiering

VirtualWisdom helps determine optimal use of virtualized server and SAN infrastructure and eliminates over-provisioning. VirtualWisdom finds underutilized resources, enables rebalancing, and helps IT avoid buying unnecessary servers, storage, or switch ports. VirtualWisdom also helps determine when and how much future capacity to acquire. As an example, we typically fi nd that storage port utilization can be increased by 50% or more. The industry average “all in” cost of a storage port – comprising a storage port, core switch port, and attendant cabling – is approximately $4,000 per port. If VirtualWisdom can help eliminate or defer the purchase of an additional 32 ports ($128,000) for one business unit, the cost of deploying VirtualWisdom is easily justified.

3. Better adherence to, and monitoring of SLAs and external regulations

VirtualWisdom provides historical and real-time performance dashboards, helping to focus problem identifi cation and resolution in heterogeneous environments to maintain SLA compliance. Our customers typically manage the most important, mission-critical
data in their company and use VirtualWisdom to prove adherence to various compliance requirements; these include external compliance standards such as Basel II in Europe or HIPAA in the US as well as internal SLAs. Outsourcers and service providers (especially SAAS providers) fi nd these capabilities extremely benefi cial in tracking SLAs.

4. Higher revenues through accelerated application & SAN deployments

VirtualWisdom delivers the required visibility to ensure a successful virtual server or SAN deployment and to properly plan infrastructure acquisitions. IT can monitor production deployment rollouts in real time to ensure all is performing as expected, with no misconfigurations or version incompatibilities. VirtualWisdom finds performance problems, and helps improve application performance. VirtualWisdom also helps validate new technologies by providing real-time measurements to determine the positive or negative performance impact of IT infrastructure changes.

5. Stronger vendor management and improved vendor relationships

VirtualWisdom offers a vendor-independent view of SAN component interdependencies, effectively decreasing risk of a multi-vendor strategy and eliminating fi nger pointing. By instrumenting and measuring, IT gets increased transparency from pre-sales claims through post-sales issue resolution, and can much more easily validate vendor claims. Further, by providing your vendors with accurate, granular metrics early in troubleshooting events, you significantly improve their ability to assist you in finding problem root causes.