With software-defined data centers transforming the way IT is delivering services, enterprise management vendors have struggled to keep up with the paradigm shift from managing individual elements to managing IT services. Modern, on-demand services deployed across highly virtualized and cloud-based infrastructures require radically different management approaches to ensure a predictable quality of service. Recently, in his Mind the Gap keynote speech in London, Amitabh Srivastava described EMC’s strategy for helping customers make this transition while “bridging the gap” between traditional client/server (2nd Platform) and cloud (3rd Platform) computing environments with a robust set of management and automation capabilities.
With the introduction of Storage Resource Management Suite 3.0 (SRM 3.0) and ViPR 1.1, EMC has taken a huge leap forward in delivering simplified, unified, and automated management for legacy and software-defined datacenters. Congratulations EMC! A single product, a single architecture, and a single pane of glass. Not only has EMC delivered on a common presentation layer that is easily customizable and intuitive, but they have also delivered a highly scalable and flexible backend data ingestion engine thanks to the acquisition of Watch4Net (now fully integrated into SRM 3.0). Why is this so important? This open and extensible architecture allows EMC to ingest, analyze, and correlate data sets from best of breed solutions for unparalleled visibility, analytics, reporting and automation.
At Virtual Instruments our goal is to help customers manage the performance of their IT infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. IT leaders today are grappling with increasingly complex IT environments, many of which are highly virtualized, and are trying to manage a tremendous amount of data. Software-defined solutions are enabling IT to dynamically respond to changing user and application needs, assuring that IT can deliver a flexible and scalable infrastructure. All of this drives the need for a sophisticated set of Infrastructure Performance Management capabilities to ensure the IT infrastructure is operating at peak performance. The Virtual Instruments team is pleased to announce theVirtualWisdom SolutionPack for the EMC® Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite.
The VirtualWisdom SolutionPack extends and enhances the EMC SRM Suite by providing sub-second performance analysis and SCSI-level protocol visibility to help accelerate the transition from the 2nd Platform to the 3rd Platform.
Virtual Wisdom: Analyzes Performance of Every Transaction in Real-time and is Fully Integrated into EMC Storage Resource Management Suite 3.0
Ensure High Performance Before/After Data Moves
With exponential growth in data and applications, IT frequently struggles to effectively manage scale up and scale out to meet the demands of application owners while maintaining service level objectives (SLOs). More often than not, IT attempts to address this problem by delivering excess capacity as an attempt to provide a performance buffer for application scale out while loosely defining SLOs around utilization and capacity. Unfortunately, legacy measurements like resource utilization and capacity are inadequate for ensuring the consistent and reliable delivery of millions of applications to billions of users across next generation platforms. The ability to accurately measure I/O exchange completion times (ECT) in real time across every transaction is a far more effective and accurate measurement of how well the underlying infrastructure is responding to application requests and how well it will perform under load or at scale. At the nucleus of Infrastructure Performance Management is the ability to measure infrastructure latency with I/O completion times while aligning workloads to infrastructures that can support those SLOs.
Exchange Completion Time (ECT). Analyzes every I/O transaction, every second
VirtualWisdom dashboard widget provides a real-time view of application instance metrics, here, showing read response for two applications are unacceptable and points SAN infrastructure as the culprit.
This dashboard widget clearly shows a latency problem in the SAN by identifying an Exchange Completion Time of over 41 miliseconds, at the server port.
Infrastructure Performance Management is the ability to continuously capture, correlate and analyze in real time, the system-wide performance, utilization and health of heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. By combining the performance and capacity monitoring capabilities of the EMC SRM Suite with the sub-second protocol level visibility of Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom SolutionPack, EMC is the first storage management vendor to deliver an integrated measurement and optimization solution for de-risking and accelerating the journey to the 3rd Platform. By unlocking this unique data set (200+ metrics every second across every I/O transaction) within the EMC SRM Suite, customers can safely and confidently leverage ViPR to automate the management and provisioning of storage across heterogeneous vendors and cloud providers. With the confidence to define, set and adhere to SLOs knowing every I/O transaction will be measured and monitored in real time, minding and managing the gap will undoubtedly become a thing of the past as EMC appears to have struck a perfect balance between Storage Resource Management (instrumentation layer), ViPR (abstraction and automation layer) and Infrastructure Performance Management (performance assurance layer). Enjoy your seamless path to the 3rd Platform!