High-performance IT infrastructure and anytime, anywhere access to business resources aren’t just standard user expectations. They’re business necessities. However, increasingly complex IT infrastructure – more users, more devices, more applications, more systems – can make obstacles to availability and performance more difficult to pinpoint and address. Virtualization can help you reduce costs and consolidate infrastructure, but even virtualization adds a layer of complexity and abstraction that muddies the waters.
Utilization metrics, once considered an indicator of performance, have limited usefulness today. While utilization accounts for certain factors that can affect performance, infrastructure can have capacity to spare but still might not be delivering adequate performance. Also, most organizations use device-specific monitoring and management tools that are incapable of providing a complete picture of infrastructure performance.
The fact is, downtime, performance degradation, over-provisioning of infrastructure, and the creation of IT war rooms are typically the result of infrastructure complexity run amok. Real-time visibility, holistic monitoring and application awareness can help you overcome infrastructure complexity and the resulting symptoms.
True infrastructure performance management (IPM) requires an end-to-end view of infrastructure. IPM is the process of monitoring the health of all infrastructure systems and components to ensure infrastructure as a whole is performing at an optimal level.
An IPM solution tells you infrastructure response times and other important metrics. Rather than replacing device-specific tools, an IPM solution complements them by collecting data from all infrastructure components, including virtual machines, servers, switches and storage solutions.
IPM benefits both the business side and the IT side of the organization. Without IPM, you would have to rely on vendor claims, internal testing, and educated guesses to forecast performance. This approach increases risk and often leads to over-provisioning of IT resources. An IPM solution can help you optimize infrastructure capacity, increase utilization and accelerate infrastructure response times. It can also help you identify and quickly address infrastructure issues that could be slowing performance and hampering the user experience. On the business side, IPM can help you increase availability and performance, reduce costs and improve the customer experience.
Virtual Instruments recently introduced VirtualWisdom, which it calls “the industry’s most comprehensive infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform.” VirtualWisdom monitors, analyzes and optimizes infrastructure health holistically — across physical, virtual and cloud environments — to maximize performance and utilization.
VirtualWisdom knows which applications are running on which infrastructure components. It understands the level of performance your infrastructure is delivering for each application. It can tell which applications are causing strain on infrastructure. This makes it possible to proactively ensure the performance and health of the infrastructure that is supporting your mission-critical applications. You can also proactively troubleshoot issues and address them at the source before users and business operations are affected.
Using predictive analytics, you can accurately forecast compute, network and storage consumption and avoid reaching capacity limits. Workload infrastructure balancing continuously adjusts resources to optimize application performance and utilization. This typically allows VirtualWisdom customers to save 30 percent to 50 percent on infrastructure costs.
Don’t let complex IT infrastructure slow down the performance of important applications and drive up IT costs. Let us show you how the VirtualWisdom IPM solution intelligently monitors infrastructure health as a whole to optimize performance and availability.
