EXECUTIVESUMMARY

INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Delivering Optimized Enterprise Performance in Support of Critical U.S. Federal Government Information Technology Initiatives

John McDonaldDirector, Virtual Instruments Federal

(M) 571-246-1874 (E) john.mcdonald@virtualinstruments.com

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe U.S. Federal Government is entering a sensitive phase in regards to its key information technology initiatives. Increased agency and mission requirements, reduced budgets, and exploding data demands have created a height-ened sense of urgency around next generation physical, virtual and cloud architectures. It is critical that key ini-tiatives such as Government Cloud, Enterprise Applications and Services, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and Data Center Consolidation succeed and deliver enhanced information capabilities in support of government’s IT mission. To achieve success in all of these areas, it is critical that agency IT leaders and operators have access to enhanced situational awareness regarding the operational IT environment. Good situational awareness empowers IT decision-makers with the ability to make smart, informed decisions regarding architecture, engineering, acqui-sition and operations. Conversely, poor situational awareness can doom any organization to make poor decisions which can negatively impact budget, mission success, and cause loss of life. To guarantee mission success and reduce operational and budget risk, it’s imperative for the federal government to consider utilization of an Infrastruc-ture Performance Management (IPM) solution from the industry leader - Virtual Instruments.

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 envi-ronments. Ultimately, IPM enables IT to establish and maintain the service levels that government agencies require while driving the systems level optimization and agility that is the promise of virtualization and the cloud. There are certain capabilities that define infrastructure performance management, among them the ability to look not just at utilization and health but to also correlate them to real-time performance. Subsequently, it also requires the ability to not just look at the device layer but look at the systems layer and not just drive systems layer health, but drive systems level optimization.

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The Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) market is well established, but is very much device specific with a uti-lization-bound view of the infrastructure. It doesn’t reach into performance and there’s no ability to correlate across the system. The Application Performance Management (APM) space stretches into the performance quadrant, and understands performance from the server to the end user, but has no visibility into the infrastructure and therefore no ability to look at the systems level and systems level optimization. Network Performance Management (NPM) tools are very specific to the IP network and TCP/IP communications which is very much less relevant to the sup-porting enterprise class infrastructure that applications rely on for day-to-day operation. Finally, there is the Storage Resource Management (SRM) space that very device specific or offers a device level view into utilization but has no view in to performance and no ability to optimize across the system.

An infrastructure performance management solution like Virtual Instruments’ - VirtualWisdom, not only looks at utilization and health but also at performance across the entire systems layer. Nearly everyone is beginning to talk about how they fit into the infrastructure performance management space, but the reality is that no one else actually has a view into true systems level performance across multiple layers in that stack. In fact, the only company today who can do this is Virtual Instruments.

Virtual Instruments is the leader in Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM). IPM is becoming an essential component of any organization’s IT management strategy. Ultimately, IPM enables IT to establish and maintain the service levels required to deliver the resources needed for applications to perform optimally. Greater situational awareness of the supporting data center infrastructure allows IT operators to deliver upon the promise of virtualized and cloud architectures:

• Increased Utilization

• Increased Cost Savings

• Greater Operational Efficiencies

• Flexible and Agile Computing

However, the very technology that promises to deliver computing into a new era has decreased visibility, increased risk and broadened the impact of service affecting outages. Widespread adoption of desktop/server/storage virtu-alization and government-wide data center consolidation has become both the solution and the problem. Without an IPM solution in place that proactively monitors the environment for performance or health impacting events, the impact to the organization could include:

• Loss of data and risk of mission failure

• Slow rollout and adoption of enterprise services

• Increased helpdesk demand and longer time to resolution of problems

• Lost productivity and man-hours

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Virtual Instruments offers a flexible engagement model to suit almost any government organization, mission or architecture. The key value of a Virtual Instruments solution is the ability to monitor IT infrastructure in an “always on”, real-time persistent monitoring fashion. However, as “XaaS” offerings have proliferated across the government marketplace, Virtual Instruments has bundled our technology into services that can provide government IT with valuable information related to many of the key initiatives being undertaken. A sample of these services includes:

• Performance Audit, Assessment and Baseline Services

• Data Center Consolidation Assessment Services

• Emergency Troubleshooting and HealthCheck Services (SOS)

• Consolidation and Migration Services

• Infrastructure Performance Management and Monitoring as a Service

These services provide significant value at all phases of any IT initiative and are typically the entry point for a Virtual Instruments solution. Initial deployment with Virtual Instruments typically focuses on the organizations’ most mis-sion critical applications that require guaranteed uptime and availability. The other services listed can be one-time or ongoing engagement that provides IT leadership with independent, vendor agnostic, and unbiased information. This information is delivered in a way to help IT leadership make smart decisions from architecture and design phase, through implementation, verification and application migration, to ongoing sustainment and optimization ef-forts. The metrics provided can also be utilized to deliver cost/benefit results required by oversight to demonstrate progress, return on investment and budgetary savings of such initiatives as data center consolidation and cloud computing.

There are a number of competing “tools” that claim to deliver real-time performance metrics; however none offer the ability to capture comprehensive, accurate, and granular metrics ‘on the wire’ in real-time. These unique and high value features add significantly to the Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom solution making it unique and best of breed in the market today.

By correlating critical sources of information on government IT infrastructures, Virtual Instruments can deliver a critical component to any federal IT initiative. Virtual Instruments executes on a vision that offers the promise of low operational risk combined with low cost of operation. For the first time, government IT leaders can have the informa-tion needed to engineer service level targets at the lowest possible cost. Operations teams will have the information needed to drive mean time to resolution towards zero, resulting in dramatically improving application availability and performance. By choosing to deploy Virtual Instruments, Federal Enterprise IT will be able to reach an ideal level of optimization and deliver unparalleled infrastructure and application performance.

Virtual Instruments is a dynamic, fast-growing technology company with a performance driven culture. Founded in June 2008 we are headquartered in the heart of the Silicon Valley, led by an industry-proven executive team, and backed by a group of highly experienced and successful investors. As a company, we are focused on delivering un-paralleled value to our customers through a truly innovative combination of disruptive technology and evolutionary services. Our customers represent industry leading brands in every major vertical market, all of whom have some of the most performance sensitive and complex IT environments in the world. Our unwavering commitment to our cus-tomers’ success, ensuring the performance and availability of their mission critical application workload as they mi-grate from physical to virtual and cloud computing environments, is what has fueled our record growth and is driving the ongoing development of our award winning Infrastructure Performance Management platform, VirtualWisdom.

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VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS SOLUTION“Not buying VirtualWisdom for your SAN is like hospitals not buying heart monitors” -Global Fortune 500 Manufacturing Company

No other solution provides a system wide view of data center infrastructure. VirtualWisdom is vendor agnostic, agent-less, passive and out of band. It is the only solution that does not impact what it is measuring.

Instrumentation Hardware and Software

Virtual Instruments provides unique instrumentation to data center infrastructure. The data is unique within the industry and arms IT managers with vital data for tactical and strategic data center decisions.

A VirtualWisdom System consists of several major components:

• Traffic Analysis Points (TAP)

• Probes

• Portal server software

• Dashboard client to visually monitor the health, performance and utilization of your environment

• Views client application to manage and monitor the system and generate reports

VirtualWisdom Server

SAN Performance Probe

Storage ArraysSANInsight® TAP Patch Panel

SAN Availability ProbeSW

Virtual Server ProbeVM

FC Switch Fabric

Servers & VMs

Zero Agents, Passive, Vendor Agnostic, Out of Brand

©2013 Virtual Instruments. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. VirtualWisdom, Virtual Instruments, SANInsight are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or servicemarks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners. 06/13

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SAN Performance Probe (Model ProbeFC8)

Fibre-Channel SAN Performance Probes (ProbeFC8s) analyze ev-ery frame header on a fibre-channel SAN at line rates up to 8 Gbits per second. ProbeFC8 probes detect application performance slowdowns and transmission errors by measuring every SCSI I/O transaction in real-time from start to finish, for every server/vol-ume combination (initiator/target/ LUN).

SANInsight™ TAP Patch Panel System

Traffic Access Points (TAPs) provide a passive, fail-safe access point to fibre-channel network traffic on a SAN for failure analy-sis, problem diagnosis, and performance monitoring. TAPs oper-ate “out-of-band” by transparently diverting a portion of the signal through the TAP to another port, which provides an exact copy of the Fibre Channel frame headers. The agent-less TAP has no im-pact on application or SAN performance. SAN Availability Probe

SAN Availability Probe is a software probe that utilizes the MIB (management information block) from Fibre Channel switches via SNMP to gather switch performance and link error statistics in a non-intrusive manner. The SAN Availability Probe monitors all the ports of a particular FibreChannel switch and collects the metrics for each port, such as the number of frames and bytes, as well as the key faults for each port, such as loss of synchronization, link resets, link failures, packet discards, and CRC errors. The SAN Availability Probe calculates the throughput (in MB per second) for each port and the percentage of utilization based on link speed.

Virtual Server Probe

Virtual Server Probe is a virtual software probe that collects per-formance and utilization data from VMware ESX virtual machines, physical servers and clusters. Virtual Server Probe collects status of CPU, memory, SAN and LAN I/O utilization from each virtual machine, physical server and cluster managed by a VMware vCen-ter. Virtual Server Probe calculates the throughput (in MB per sec-ond) for each HBA port and the percentage of utilization based on link speed. The VirtualWisdom Server correlates data from Virtual Server Probe with metrics gathered by SAN Availability Probe and SAN Performance Probe to build a complete picture of I/O for each virtual machine or physical server.