Virtual Instruments has introduced its VirtualWisdom 3.0 product suite, which includes the new 8Gb SAN Performance Probe, to provide comprehensive visibility across servers, networks and storage.

A real-time, vendor-independent, cross-domain infrastructure monitoring solution, VirtualWisdom 3.0 helps companies improve infrastructure performance and availability, reduce operating and capital expenditures, and accelerate the transition of business-critical applications to a private cloud environment.

The optimization of IT infrastructure, comprised of servers, networks, storage and applications requires IT personnel and enabling solutions to have a cross-domain view of performance, resource utilization and availability. However, each of these domains is typically the purview of a dedicated job function. With the added complexity of virtualization and private cloud computing, this siloed approach of running a data center is no longer viable. The VirtualWisdom 3.0 platform is the only solution that can help ensure the performance of business-critical applications in a virtualized environment through real-time analysis of SAN I/O traffic data.

“IT departments purchased server, application, database and network monitoring tools long before Fibre Channel SANs were implemented. Therefore, administrators often have a large number of tools to manage and interrogate these components, but few that report on the storage and SAN fabric,” says Valdis Filks, Research Director, Gartner, in his report “Recommendations for SAN Fabric Dashboards” (June 2, 2011). “IT departments must be able to quickly identify and repair any problems before an outage occurs and fix any degradation in performance or availability in the SAN fabric before IT service is negatively affected.”

“IT roles that look across all aspects of the virtualized data center have the potential to become the next hot IT job,” adds John W. Thompson, president and CEO, Virtual Instruments. “The new VirtualWisdom platform provides the essential cross-domain infrastructure monitoring solution to enable this new role and to ensure superior business-critical application performance and availability in the emerging private cloud infrastructure.”

The VirtualWisdom 3.0 solution combines a new 8Gb-capable hardware probe with next-generation software features to deliver expanded monitoring support and increased ease-of-use to help IT managers optimize their physical and virtual IT infrastructures. VirtualWisdom is unique as it supports all Fibre Channel switches and devices independent of supplier.
Continuing Innovation

VirtualWisdom 3.0 and the new 8Gb SAN Performance Probe offer enhanced metrics and improved ease of use in a streamlined format to simplify life for SAN and IT managers. The VirtualWisdom platform also includes the Virtual Server Probe for accessing performance and utilization data related to VMware vSphere environments, the SAN Availability Probe for monitoring SAN directors and switches, and the SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System for accessing data from the fiber optic physical layer.

The new SAN Performance Probe, Model FC8, was designed to simultaneously monitor up to eight Fibre Channel links with a single probe and supports redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and redundant cooling fans. The device analyzes each frame on a Fibre Channel SAN to provide statistics about storage I/O traffic from the virtual machine to the LUN on the storage array.

Also available with VirtualWisdom 3.0 is the new RemoteWisdom Access Platform, which enables remote file access into VirtualWisdom servers by Virtual Instruments support personnel to ensure streamlined support and continuous availability of VirtualWisdom monitoring solutions.