Emulex Rolls Out OneCommand Vision 3.0 Portfolio

Emulex Corporation announced the availability of OneCommand Vision 3.0, a proactive performance management solution designed to optimize storage I/O resources within virtualized and cloud environments.

It adds a portfolio of options to meet the diverse needs of customers and also extends support to include host-centric and SAN-attached storage connected via iSCSI, DAS and Logical Volumes presented to servers.

"OneCommand Vision is uniquely positioned to provide complete end-to-end I/O performance management, delivering increased server and application performance and availability while decreasing operational expenses, potentially saving organizations more than $200,000 per year in reclaimed storage," said Shaun Walsh, SVP of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "Offering a portfolio enables customers of all sizes 100% visibility throughout the I/O path with OneCommand Vision."

The OneCommand Vision 3.0 family now includes Professional, Essentials and Free editions to suit the needs of customers of all sizes.

These include:

• OneCommand Vision Professional: Scalable to manage thousands of application server endpoints in medium to large data center environments that deploy multiple tiers of storage, including host-side I/O caching technologies.
• OneCommand Vision Essentials: Proactive I/O management for up to 15 business-critical application servers. Designed for specific business units within large or small enterprise data centers.
• OneCommand Vision Free Edition: Feature-limited version designed to help administrators quickly characterize near-term I/O performance and availability for up to five business critical, SAN-attached application servers.
• OneCommand Vision enables visibility into the proverbial I/O ‘blind spot’ in the data center with the following features and benefits:
• Eliminate I/O Bottlenecks and Accelerate Application Performance: OneCommand Vision helps maximize I/O resource utilization, by proactively monitoring storage performance and health metrics, sending Intelligent Alerts that can help to prevent costly slowdowns and outages. OneCommand Vision 3.0 supports a range of host-side and SAN-attached storage devices connected via FC, FCoE, iSCSI, DAS, host-side I/O cache, SSD or Logical Volumes. Other solutions provide performance from the storage or SAN perspective.
• End-to-end I/O Performance Assurance for Data Center and Cloud Environments: IT administrators can automate the monitoring, reporting, and enforcement using SLAs. OneCommand Vision establishes and manages I/O availability and performance SLAs including situations where storage infrastructure is outsourced to a third party, creating SLAs that are based on real-world historical performance information for each environment.
• Lower Time to Resolution (TTR) for Complex Storage Issues: It automates early issue detection using Intelligent Alerting, dashboards, and reports. IT administrators can configure throughput, IOPS, and response-time metrics and receive alerts to pinpoint potential problems across the entire infrastructure or a specific group within the environment, reducing TTR to minutes, instead of hours or days, while reducing operational expenses.
• Storage Path Availability Management: OneCommand Vision ‘sees’ the same path availability that the application sees, encompassing multipath configuration, OS error handling faults, storage protocol, switch zoning, LUN masking, and array-related faults.
• Scalable Software Solution, No Special Hardware Needed: It now supports Windows Server 2012, VMware vSphere ESX 5.1, in addition to existing support for Citrix Xen Server, IBM AIX, Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), Oracle Solaris, Oracle KVM and VMware ESX v4.1 and 5.0. It also integrates with Emulex and non-Emulex adapters.
• Experts Training: Emulex now offers OneCommand Vision Training modules via the Emulex Experts program to help customers understand the basics of I/O management and OneCommand Vision, and how it can be used to improve I/O performance. The Emulex Expert Certification Program demonstrates mastery of Emulex products.

"Highly virtualized environments are more than just compute resources. There are interdependencies across the server, network, and storage domains, and as organizations increase the density of VMs per physical server, the impact to the I/O path can be profound," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Our upcoming Solution Impact Study reveals that OneCommand Vision addresses the problems associated with end-to-end visibility in the I/O path, helping customers more effectively manage their environments and reduce the I/O blind spot, saving time, money and resources."

"With support for iSCSI and DAS, OneCommand Vision has extended their unique application view of performance to include host-side storage caching solutions that utilize both super-fast SSD and storage on iSCSI infrastructures running over high-speed Internet to the cloud," said Bob Shinn, senior managing partner, Cloud Silver Lining.

Emulex was demonstrating OneCommand Vision 3.0 at VMworld in San Francisco, CA.