Virtual Instruments shows the way with SAN optimisation

SAN management company Virtual Instruments has launched a version of its Net Wisdom monitoring product. VirtualWisdom 2.0 measures the effect of virtualised applications on corporate SANs, including 0 includes instrumentation, measurement and analysis tools - the basis for performance and resource optimisation.

New features of the product include user-definable correlations enable a type of "What-if" analysis based on real production data. According to Virtual Instruments' VP of marketing, said that this functionality would provide IT managers with the ability to accurately predict the effect of SAN configuration changes. "We've added a historical feature so that an administrator would be able to check what happened 10 hours or two days ago.".

Rosenthal said that another feature of the new product was the ProbeVM capability which would assist administrators monitor I/O from the virtualised servers through the SAN to the LUNs within storage arrays. he said that the ProbeVM was just one of the tools at the administrator's disposal. " He can pull data from three different probes: switch probe, VM probe and TAP and by analysing all that data build up a bigger picture of what's happening in the SAN," he said.

The problem faced by many administrators is that management of the SAN is a bit of a black art, said Rosenthal. "Most people don't understand it, unless they're really deep SAN administrator. Most administrators have never really looked inside the SAN," he said. "Most SAN administrators are storage people - if you're from an IP background it's pretty clear what's going on - but if you come from a conventional SAN background, then it's new to you."

The company has also introduced a widget-based dashboard to help with the SAN analysis."Our previous dashboard was fixed with the metrics that we offered - our customers didn't like that. The new one offers more flexibility. We do have a default screen, we say that we think these are the 12 most important metrics when we install it Then we come back 30 days later and find out what they've learned in those 30 days," he said.

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