SIOS Technology Corp. announced the immediate availability of SIOS iQ standard edition, a simple, intelligent software solution for understanding IT operations and resolving issues in dynamic VMware environments.

Designed to be a primary resource for IT operations information and issue resolution, SIOS iQ applies advanced machine learning analytics to a broad range of data sets - including application and infrastructure data from third party tools and frameworks - to recognize abnormal patterns of behavior and identify root causes of performance issues.

“The ease-of-use designed into our patented SIOS PERC Dashboard™ is unique in the industry,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology Corp. “By putting all key information at their fingertips, SIOS iQ enables IT managers to ensure their applications are operating efficiently, that issues are identified and resolved quickly, and that VMware resources are not being wasted.”

Traditional approaches focus on recording and reporting discrete events, (e.g., CPU utilization exceeding a threshold) to identify a problem in a VMware environment. With these approaches, complex or subtle issues often go unnoticed and IT staff are inundated with alerts without guidance for prioritizing, interpreting or correcting them. SIOS iQ identifies problems and recommends the best solutions, filtering out the noise and alert storms typical in traditional approaches.

“We designed SIOS iQ to give IT managers a simple way to solve the most pressing problems in today’s complex VMware environments,” said Sergey A. Razin, Ph.D., CTO, SIOS Technology Corp. “Its advanced, extensible platform architecture enables SIOS iQ to consolidate a variety of data sources into a single repository where it can apply advanced analytics to deliver critical intelligence, information, and predictions in an easy to use form.”

To solve an issue using traditional approaches, IT departments typically assemble a team of domain experts (network, application, infrastructure, etc.), who spend hours manually compiling and analyzing data from several sources to identify causes and assign ownership of solutions. SIOS iQ eliminates the need for this approach by automatically identifying the root cause of performance issues, recommending practical solutions and accurately predicting the cost savings and performance improvements that will result if the recommendations are implemented.

"The new SIOS iQ standard edition adds VM performance management functions to existing resource efficiency capabilities to help IT organizations identify problems, determine root causes and optimize applications performance in VM environments. Built-in graphical discovery, machine learning, recommendations and predictive capabilities will help simplify the problem solving process for IT administrators and operations staff," said Tim Grieser, Program VP, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC.

Major features of the standard edition of SIOS iQ include:

- Performance Root Cause Analysis learns the relationships of objects and their normal patterns of behavior in a VMware infrastructure (hosts, VMs, application, network, storage, etc.); proactively identifies anomalies in behavior and the root causes of performance problems in any application; and recommends specific changes to resolve those problems.

- SIOS PERC Dashboard enables IT managers to quickly and easily ensure their VMware environment is optimized along four key quality of service dimensions: performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity (PERC). Provides mobile application ease of-use. The standard edition of SIOS iQ includes a variety of user enhancements, including the ability to expand charts to drill deeply into specific PERC areas, color-coded status indicators showing the criticality of issues - critical, warning and informational, and the inclusion of performance impact analysis showing all applications, VMs, hosts and data stores associated with a detected performance problem.

- Specialized Analytics for SQL Server provides advanced insight into performance issues associated with SQL Server deployments in VMware. SIOS iQ standard edition correlates interactions between SQL and infrastructure resources in the VMware environment to identify the deep root cause of performance issues.

- Enhanced Host Based Caching feature helps IT staff to easily determine how to improve storage performance for applications by using server side storage and host based caching (HBC). It analyzes the environment, including all blocks written to disk, and identifies the read ratio and the load profile to identify the VMs (and their disks) that will benefit most from HBC. SIOS iQ makes specific configuration recommendations such as how much cache to add and what cache block size to configure. It predicts the added performance that will be achieved if recommendations are implemented and shows the results in a single, easy-to-read chart.

- SIOS iQ Resource Optimization features. New standard edition of SIOS iQ provides an enhanced user interface for optimizing VMware resources by identifying and eliminating idle VMs and snapshot sprawl. SIOS iQ identifies under-used virtual machines and unnecessary snapshots and predicts the potential monthly savings that can be realized by eliminating them.