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By All Akorri BloggersWhat’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.
Can You Get Performance and Capacity Assurance in a Virtual World?
By Lisa Crewe
Capacity management is a hot topic these days. There’s no doubt that it’s more difficult in a virtualization environment and you can get easily get into trouble – especially on the storage side – if you don’t have some guidance. I recently talked with an end user who suffered a failure in a VMware cluster environment because a thin provisioned volume on an array ran out of space to expand. It took down a bunch of VMs and he spent the next 48 hours rectifying the problem. Not fun.
According to Forrester, capacity management is the top operational concern among IT professionals using virtualization. IT Business Edge recently published an article I wrote on this topic that I thought I’d share titled, Assuring Performance and Capacity Management in a Virtual World.
You can get a handle on it and there are some tools out there to help. Read this article to learn how.
Akorri Saved the Day
By Lisa Crewe
This is a direct quote from one of our customers for whom BalancePoint identified a potential issue before it impacted performance.
In a nutshell, BalancePoint’s Performance Index was showing a rating of 600-700, which is way out of normal range, for every monitored host for four days. Over a seven day period, Performance Index had been spiking at the same time every morning. In the actual servers however, the customer had seen no performance degradation or any complaints about the issue they saw in the logs.
For those not familar with Performance Index, ideally, you want to manage your infrastructure to a Performance Index of 100. Performance Index is BalancePoint’s data center level metric produced for each application that can be used to quickly and easily optimize usage of a system by balancing capacity utilization with good performance. BalancePoint is the only solution on the market that has a metric of this kind. Watch this video to learn more about Performance Index.
As it turns out, there was a change to the SAN backend that the admin was not aware of and this created a volume contention issue. The customer’s resolution was to undo the change to the SAN.
“Akorri saved the day by highlighting the issue,” the admin told our customer service team.
You can read how other companies have also had excellent results with BalancePoint here.
Virtualization is Performance Management, But Don’t Forget the Physical
By Lisa Crewe
I read Greg Shields blog today on Windows IT Pro about the need for performance management tools when using virtualization. I agree with his conclusion that “performance management is job one in virtualization”. However, I would add that true performance and capacity optimization requires insight and analysis into both performance and utilization for virtual and physical machines including storage. And that admins can’t guarantee performance of virtualized applications to the business unless they have insight and intelligence into both.
If you’re managing performance of the virtual machines and the physical machines separately it can make you feel like you have two jobs. Who has time for that?
What’s needed is a solution that handles both and can provide the following:
- A metric that proves your VMs always perform optimally using minimal server and storage resources.
- Measure and record the round trip response time of your virtual infrastructure? (virtual/physical; storage/server)
- Alarms that isolate specific applications that have poor performance due to disk contention
- A topology map that automatically discovers and displays I/O paths through virtual and physical servers and storage
Learn how you can get that combination. Watch this video.
Hear from Your Peers at VMworld: Vote for Case Studies
By Lisa Crewe
This year you can have a say in what sessions you’d like to see at VMworld. VMworld has opened public voting.
Many conferences have a hard time finding customers willing to present their story even though they are typically the most well received sessions. There are several case study sessions to vote for in the Virtualization 101 track including one from SandRidge Energy (Session ID: V18113).
Sandridge Energy is a natural gas and oil company headquartered in Oklahoma City. They were challenged by some mounting performance problems and needed visibility into their virtual and physical environment including storage and how everything worked together. Vote for this session to learn how they were able to get immediate insight and improve efficiency end to end. You can read more about them now here.
There are 8 tracks and you can vote as many times as you like in each track, but only once per session. If you like a session, just click on the ‘thumbs up’, but you have to be logged in. So if you don’t already have a vmworld.com accout you have to create one at www.vmworld.com/login.jspa
Get out the vote and hear from your peers.
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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