Akorri Blog Authors
Innovation Insights
By Rich CorleyCIO Perspectives
By John GavinMarket & Industry Watch
By Lisa CreweIT Perspectives
By Rob Strechay
Market and Industry Watch
By Lisa CreweManaging virtual environments: Common myths
By Lisa Crewe
I read a nice article this weekend from Rupert Collier on virtualization management myths. These are the three he identifies and dispells.
- Myth #1: Virtualisation guarantees performance
- Myth #2: Virtualised IT silos can be managed in isolation
- Myth #3: Virtualised IT can be managed separately from the physical infrastructure
You can read the article here. What other myths would you add to this list?
10 VMware Performance Problems to Avoid
By Lisa Crewe
If you’re a VMware user you will run into performance problems. Guaranteed. Virtualization provides tremendous benefits, but like every technology there are common problems. These are some of the issues end users we’ve talked to have experienced.
- You bought more memory for your ESX server and it didn’t fix the performance problem.
- VMware DRS causes you performance problems every time it moves a virtual machine.
- VM performance problems come and go and you can’t figure out why.
- You haven’t turned on VMware DRS because you’re afraid of what it will do to your performance.
- The SSDs you purchased are not delivering the performance you expected.
- You ran into poor performance due to running a VM on a LUN with the wrong RAID level.
- The new array you purchased doesn’t perform as expected in your virtual environment
- You spent days debugging a VMware related issue using data from several different tools.
- Your application owners complain that their application performance on VMware is worse than when it was run on a dedicated physical server.
- Application performance problems are experienced by end-users and you found it’s not the network or the application.
Do you have one we didn’t mention? I’d love to hear about it and add it to the list.
Who’s What in Service & Capacity Management
By Lisa Crewe
Virtualization Practice Analyst, Bernd Herzog, recently included Akorri in his “Who’s Who in Virtualization Management,” blog post. His point is well taken that VMware is currently offering a set of disjointed point products as its set of management offerings and each one of these offerings should be evaluated individually against the relevant third party competition.
He listed Akorri in the “Service & Capacity Management” category along with a few other vendors. In this list, Akorri BalancePoint is the only analytics-based solution for server to storage performance analysis and capacity planning for both physical and virtual environments.
We’ve long held that solutions that can understand interdependencies across all layers of the infrastructure and bring sophisticated correlation engines to the table will pave the way to the future of the next generation data center. Such tools are simply a key component of the management layer required in an increasingly complex, dense, consolidated, virtualized, and ever-changing data center.
Today, BalancePoint, plugged into VMware’s vCenter management console, reaches well beyond any virtual or physical data center silo, and paints a picture of end to end infrastructure performance, predicting performance issues, avoiding outages, and optimizing utilization for total data center visibility.
For more information about BalancePoint visit: www.akorri.com/video
BalancePoint: A fresh new tool for your IT arsenal! This product is a lifesaver for those trying to actively manage their ever growing cloud infrastructure.
By Lisa Crewe
One of our partners, Trent Steele, a Varrow IT consultant, recently blogged about Akorri BalancePoint. Read his thoughts below and then see how our product can help you at: www.akorri.com/video.
Akorri BalancePoint: The Dynamic Data Center Optimization Tool
BalancePoint: A fresh new tool for your IT arsenal! This product is a lifesaver for those trying to actively manage their ever growing cloud infrastructure.
Over the past few days our Varrow engineers have been involved with training surrounding a product that the company is extremely excited about! Our engineers have been through introductions with the company and its product BalancePoint. BalancePoint “is a third generation software product that is the only analytics based solution for server to storage performance analysis and capacity planning for both physical and virtual environments. Think of Akorri as the GPS of your IT infrastructure. Akorri supplies critical information and guidance versus a monitoring tool which just reports on a single infrastructure element (physical or virtual servers or storage or network).” What I really found interesting with the product is its ease of use. You are really able to get this product installed and configured rather quickly and when used for troubleshooting issues between virtualization, physical servers and storage there may not be another player in the market as strong currently. The reporting features of the product are pretty amazing and are readily for IT administrators and their management teams to show performance within the virtual environment.
The amount of work being placed on administrators these days is tremendous and only gets heavier from there. Most companies have the philosophy to do more with less. These are just a few reasons why a solution must be found to keep up with network sprawl which grows at a weeds pace. Everything in the data center is evolving and if things aren’t setup immediately for monitoring sometimes things get lost in the shuffle. “BalancePoint agent-less software collects statistics from the entire infrastructure, creates a dynamic model and then intelligently analyzes the information to understand how an application workload’s server, SAN and storage resources are utilized and interact. BalancePoint uniquely enables IT administrators to visualize their infrastructure, proactively identify and troubleshoot performance problems within minutes, plan future capacity requirements and measure infrastructure service levels to demonstrate efficient resource utilization to management.” Below are some of the benefits gained by using Akorri BalancePoint in your workplace, especially those who have committed to the private or public cloud and the management challenges that it provides.
BalancePoint™ deploys quickly, providing immediate benefits including:
- Same-day non-intrusive implementation
- Rapid cross-domain troubleshooting
- Optimal IT performance delivery
- Effective Infrastructure capacity planning
- Justification for IT Virtualization and Consolidation projects
With BalancePoint™ in your environment you will:
- Identify Performance Bottlenecks — Find problems and contention points before they impact operations
- Troubleshoot Problems Faster — Identify root cause quickly so people can get back to work
- Improve Storage Utilization — Use storage and server resources more efficiently and eliminate or defer new storage purchases
- Manage VMware in Production — Improve VMware server and storage performance and utilization through “single pane of glass” management·
- Optimize and Plan — Identify opportunities for improvement and plan for future growth requirements
- Maintain Service Performance — Avoid application brownouts with cross-domain correlation of applications, servers, and storage
- Guarantee Future Service — Enable performance-based capacity planning across applications, servers, and storage
- Reduce Risk — Mitigate potential issues with what-if modeling for data-tier disaster recovery plans and data center optimization projects
The BalancePoint product has won many awards and if you are interested in the product, Varrow is a certified partner and reseller and can assist you with your project. Please feel free to contact us with any questions concerning the product.
What’s a Marketer to Do?
By Lisa Crewe
BalancePoint is a unique product. I’ve had many discussions over the last few years about how to describe it and what category it belongs in. Application Resource Optimization. Virtual Infrastructure Management. Infrastructure Performance Management. IT Operations Intelligence. All accurate in one way or another, but not categories that IT buyers understand.
Why not just use something that people understand? Well, because it’s different. BalancePoint often gets confused with traditional storage resource management products or virtual machine management tools.
What’s a marketer to do? Well, what we decided to do is create this video that uses an analogy to tell the “how BalancePoint is different” story.
Our story begins…If you’re the Admin managing a virtualized data center, every morning can be like driving into a new city…
Watch the video and let me know how we did.
Akorri News Releases- Akorri BalancePoint Achieves VMware Ready™ Status September 10, 2010
- Akorri Introduces Industry’s First Cross-Domain Performance Predictor to Prevent Dynamic Data Center Outages Before They Impact the Business September 10, 2010
- Akorri Customer SandRidge Shares the Secret to Increasing IT Virtualization Efficiency at VMworld 2010 September 10, 2010
- Lost in the Clouds? Akorri Helps you Think Service Infrastructure, not Element Infrastructure September 10, 2010
- COMPUTERLINKS helps resellers develop virtualisation opportunities with addition of Akorri performance management software September 10, 2010
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