SandRidge deployed server virtualization over two years ago and has virtualized 60% of its application environment (including test and production applications). Today, over 140 machines are running on nine physical hosts supported by NetApp storage. The complex environment made it challenging to troubleshoot performance problems using the existing element management tools. When performance problems occurred, SandRidge consulted four different tools to resolve issues, which took a few systems engineers and up to a day to review data and find the “needle in the haystack.”

Cameron Han is the Infrastructure Operations Supervisor at SandRidge Energy, Inc.  I’m thrilled to share that he’s presenting his story at VMworld on how SandRidge’s IT department was able to improve their infrastructure performance using Akorri BalancePoint.

Here’s what he had to say about the product.

“BalancePoint is the only tool we found that can decipher our virtual machines, storage, and operating systems together, and we like that it will proactively notify us of potential performance bottlenecks.”

Check out the Session @ VMworld

Who: Cameron Han, Senior Systems Engineer at SandRidge Energy, Inc.

What: SandRidge Energy Increases IT Virtualization Efficiency

When: August 31, 2010 at 3:30 p.m.

Where: VMworld 2010, Moscone Center, San Francisco

Session ID: V18113, Track: Virtualization 101

If you can’t make the session, you can read the case study here.

See Us at VMworld, Booth #1331

• See a demo of BalancePoint v3.5 that Predicts Performance Issues.
• Get a cool t-shirt and wear it for a chance to win a new Apple iPad or GPS.
• Get a free drink (or two or three) during the VMworld “Hall Crawl”, Tuesday, August 31 from 4-6 p.m.

Stop by the Akorri booth and visit us!  Tell me you read my blog for an additional chance to win.

Attend this webcast to learn:

Webcast Details

Date:
Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Time:
1PM EDT / 10 AM PDT

Duration:
1 hour

Register here

Speaker:
Rich Corley, Founder and CTO for Akorri 

About Rich Corley
Corley brings more than 25 years of experience leading and contributing to technology-based companies including founding Pirus Networks which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He is responsible for leading Akorri’s engineering and R&D teams. Corley is a frequent industry speaker, most recently speaking at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, VMworld, and Interop. Corley authors his own industry Blog.

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

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.

Akorri is nominated in three categories:

o Best Virtualization Management Tools
o Best Virtualization Platforms Capacity Planning
o Best Virtualization Platforms Monitoring & Reporting

Please take the time to vote for Akorri.

Voting ends October 23 and the winners will be announced the week of November 2-4, 2009, at the “SOA in the Cloud” which is part of SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. Thank you so much for your support of Akorri!

I am going to let you in on a little secret. The Hypervisor is a commodity. What you are paying for are the software services on top of them. Yes you can argue some have more bells and whistles in the hypervisor, scale differently, support different OS’s better than others, or are cheaper. What you are paying for is the right to buy the software add-ons.

It will be interesting to see how each differentiates from each other over the next year. Who will say performance matters and deliver on service level guarantees? Which one will be the most cloud-ish? Will you care?

I think you will care, but I believe the one that builds the most complete eco-system will win. I believe it is like email wars; exchange vs notes. Most companies use exchange. Not because it has more bells and whistles or is the best “all-in-one” product. But because it is a very effective email and calendaring system. Where Lotus Notes was trying to be everything collaborative … MS gave you the options to pick off the Chinese food menu at a reasonable price.

Same will happen with hypervisors. You’re going to have the “all in one” vs the one with features core to the hypervisor (performance / stability) …

I would say the one place MS and others have never done well is management beyond fault and event. So who will be the differentiator in this space? Will it be build or buy? Who will care that not all the workloads will live in virtualized / cloud environments … many with the label of “business critical”?

I believe you will be looking once again for “best of breed” products. Products that were not meant to be panaceas or “single-panes-of-glass” but never got implemented. In my time in the IT industry I have seen people buy five or more single-panes and still never achieve any benefit. Like in the storage industry you will probably buy your element/fault management from the vender and get the rest from innovative vendors outside those vendors.

Editorial Note:
Recently some of the aforementioned hypervisor vendors have been saying they will provide you everything for your data center an even cook you breakfast in the morning. Most call this the “cloud” strategy. Clouds where you use the “services” … think web services … available. Problem is that you will not be able to simply write to one API can move workloads between “clouds”. For clouds, cloud suppliers, and such to be successful this will need to become reality. Supplying underlying infrastructure services with no easy way to write to them is only part of what would be a dramatic game changer. This is not to say “private clouds” in our IT shops will work, but leveraging “public cloud providers” will be difficult.

The guys from ESG were great. It’s clear they’ve done this before!  They showed up at the Akorri facililty in the early morning and wanted to do everything from the initial plug in of the appliance to running the most advanced analysis the product offers. Of course Murphy did have to raise his ugly head and when they plugged in the appliance it tripped a circuit breaker. Lesson learned! It’s not a good idea to plug the appliance into an outlet that already has a storage array, switch, and a few servers already plugged into it.

I did take a week off in July to vacation with my family at Sunset Beach, NC.  My wife might disagree though that I actually was on vacation since my cell phone was on constantly.  If you like warm water and nice sandy beaches Id highly recommend this place. Theres really nothing more to do than sit on the beach and soak up the sun, unless of course youre back at the cottage on your cell phone!  I promised her that next year I wouldnt bring it!

One of the best trade shows for Akorri this year was the Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations & Management show held back in mid June.  Our booth was over-flowing with interested attendees and our VP of Marketing, Tom Joyce, gave a talk on virtualization best practices that was very well attended.  You can see Toms presentation here.

The point of Toms presentation was to say that if you have one or more of the 2.3 million virtual servers that IDC estimates were deployed in 2006 or if you belong to one of the 76% of enterprises that plan to deploy virtualization within the next year then you need to think about how you are going to plan, deploy, and manage that infrastructure.  First and foremost youll need to look at your entire virtual infrastructure as a complete system.  Youll need cross-domain analysis, an understanding of your infrastructures performance not just component level performance, youll need to understand how virtualization makes everything shared and that sharing causes contention points and hot spots, and youll need to understand how to dynamically load balance your infrastructure in order to meet performance and availability metrics.

If you are serious about deploying a virtual infrastructure then give thought not only to which virtualization vendor you are going to deploy but how you are going to manage that infrastructure in the long run.