The data center, in most cases, is a mixture of legacy and modern applications that exist, both on-premises and in the cloud. To provide organizations with a competitive advantage, IT needs to use and manage these resources efficiently. IT professionals need tools to enable them to resolve problems, even as the infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex. They also need to automate as many of the mundane IT tasks as possible. Finally, they need to efficiently manage the utilization of compute, storage, and network resources.
Being Efficient On-Premises
Predictions of enterprises moving 100% of their operations to the cloud are not materializing. Instead, organizations continue to invest in their on-premises infrastructure, and it is supporting both legacy and modern application workloads. IT owns the on-premises infrastructure, and IT needs to ensure its performance and uptime. Doing so requires continuous, real-time monitoring of the environment so that IT can capture telemetry data from the infrastructure. It then needs to analyze the telemetry data for anomalies. IT also needs to optimize the utilization of infrastructure resources to limit IT overspending.
Being Efficient in the Cloud
While on-premises deployments remain popular, most enterprises are starting on implementing a hybrid cloud strategy to their advantage. Efficiency in the cloud requires confirming migration readiness and making sure IT uses cloud resources efficiently. Cloud efficiency leads to immediate cost savings since IT can almost instantly turn-off unused resources. Cloud applications also need monitoring to make sure they are performing as the application owners expect.
Being Efficient with Scale
Organizations continue to grow and scale, adding resources both on-premises and in the cloud. Scaling efficiency requires understanding what a new or growing application requires in terms of computing and storage resources and then adding those specific resources. IT can no longer blindly trust vendor-provided performance specifications. Today’s workloads vary far too much from the generic testing solutions on the market. IT needs the ability to evaluate products with the organization’s workload IO patterns, rather than generic patterns set by benchmark tools. It also needs to understand the limits of the current storage infrastructure so it can proactively move to upgrade it before performance becomes a problem.
Virtual Instruments becomes Virtana
Virtual Instruments is a recognized leader in assuring the performance of and troubleshooting storage infrastructure. Their acquisition of Load Dynamix a few years ago opened up the performance validation market. Their acquisition this year of Metricly and Netuitive enables them to provide cloud cost analysis and cloud monitoring in addition to their existing Cloud Migration Readiness services. The result of these acquisitions is Virtual Instruments is clearly no longer a storage monitoring company and far more than an instrumentation solution. The company is now an end-to-end infrastructure performance analysis, monitoring, capacity planning, and workflow automation company. To represent this change, it is rebranding itself as Virtana.
Virtana provides its customers with deep infrastructure visibility, but it does more than alert to the problem. Their solutions, powered by AI/ML capabilities, offer recommendations and, if the customer chooses, automatic resolution. Virtana also provides workload performance analysis and simulation, both on-premises and in the cloud, enabling customers to know a new solution will work, long before they decide to deploy it. Also, the Virtana solutions provide capacity and cost management, for both on-premises and in the cloud.
StorageSwiss Take
Many companies, as they acquire other solutions, tend to have those solutions run as separate entities and perform almost no integration work. Only a few provide a unifying management console. Virtana has shown early and often that it can do more than offer a unifying management console as it has proven through its prior acquisitions. The company is already providing inter-communication between its solutions, enabling them to inform each other on activities across the infrastructure. As they continue this integration, Virtana is ready to position itself as a leader in end-to-end application-aware infrastructure performance management.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
StorageSwiss.com - The Home of Storage Switzerland 