Virtual Instruments Teams with Cisco

Virtual Instruments, Inc. announced technology integration initiatives with Cisco Sytems, Inc. to simplify and lower the cost of real-time performance and availability monitoring for business-critical infrastructures.

Through the technology integration, Virtual Instruments’ App-centric infrastructure performance management platform, VirtualWisdom, can receive streamed monitoring data from Cisco’s MDS 9700 32G Module and SAN streaming solution, enabling enterprises to ensure high availability and performance of business-critical applications. The module offers built-in telemetry sensors, for efficient streaming data collection.

As enterprises continue to shift towards hybrid data centres to meet their customers’ needs, the underlying infrastructure must be able to evolve for optimal availability and performance and to keep up with the growing demands of new and changing applications. Enterprises rely on FC SAN infrastructures to help them address these challenges. Holistic visibility into the performance, health and utilisation of these infrastructures from the perspective of the application is essential.

VirtualWisdom’s App-centric analytics enable customers to find, and resolve infrastructure issues before they impact application service levels by applying machine learning to determine root cause, and recommending remedies and configuration optimisations to resolve problems.

By integrating VirtualWisdom’s app-centric SAN infrastructure monitoring and analytics platform with the MDS 9700 32G Module and SAN Streaming Fabric, Virtual Instruments enables enterprises to reduce both OpEx and CapEx costs associated with holistically monitoring and managing the health, performance and utilisation of their FC SAN infrastructures.

The integration allows Virtual Instruments to offer customers the ability to deploy granular monitoring more broadly. For application infrastructures that are moving to 32GB FC and require high-fidelity performance monitoring, an option is available where the need for a physical TAP and hardware probe is eliminated in a VirtualWisdom deployment. This is enabled by the VI/Cisco integration, where a dedicated ASIC inside the MDS switch enables the delivery of statistical data from observed workload behavior and response time metrics. The VirtualWisdom TAP and Probe architecture will still be deployed in 16Gb environments and will offer high fidelity data available for monitoring with the VirtualWisdom analytics platform for mission-critical applications.

“Both Cisco and Virtual Instruments play important roles in the performance, reliability and scalability of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud, so the integration of Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming with the VirtualWisdom performance management platform has huge value for PLEX,” said Joe Hollewa, senior manager of cloud operations, Plex Systems, Inc. “This integration will dramatically increase the breadth of visibility we have into our SAN, while reducing both the complexity and cost of traditional hardware-based instrumentation.“

The Cisco-Virtual Instruments technology integration will expand solutions to a variety of customers. Eliminating the requirement to deploy physical network TAPs and Probes, while enabling customers to access actionable insights via VirtualWisdom Advanced Analytics, will reduce the cost of monitoring and simplify VirtualWisdom deployments, extending the platform’s reach within existing enterprise accounts and expanding to mid-market customers.

“Cisco’s leading MDS storage networking product line has leapfrogged the industry with built-in sensors for high performance telemetry streaming on the Cisco MDS 9700 32G Module,” said Thomas Scheibe, senior director of product management, Cisco data center. “The combination of Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming and Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom analytics platform provides unmatched FC SAN infrastructure monitoring and analytics capabilities at an unprecedented value for customers needing to monitor SAN infrastructure in real time.“

“Our technology integration initiatives with Cisco are highly strategic for our company, as we and our channel partners are now able to offer our app-centric infrastructure performance monitoring solutions to a larger portion of our installed customers, as well as a expanded set of enterprise and mid-market customers,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO, Virtual Instruments. “With the Cisco integration, our customers can seamlessly gain the visibility of a fully instrumented infrastructure in the context of the application. This will vastly simplify IT infrastructure management, ensuring the highest availability and performance of their mission-critical apps and services.“

“Enterprises understand the critical importance of real-time monitoring of their virtualised infrastructures, but the cost of achieving such visibility has made it prohibitive for many organisations to instrument broadly,” said George Crump, analyst, Storage Switzerland, LLC. “With the new Virtual Instruments/Cisco technology integration, a much wider range of enterprises are now able to easily and cost-effectively implement comprehensive FC SAN infrastructure performance monitoring. Meanwhile, Cisco will provide its customers with a robust and highly differentiated SAN monitoring and analytics platform.“