Virtual Instruments further extended its NAS monitoring portfolio today by introducing support for the SMB protocol for the VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe. Through the Gigamon partnership and the enhanced NAS probe capabilities, Virtual Instruments now offers the industry’s most comprehensive set of performance monitoring solutions for NAS deployments.
NAS environments present unique challenges to IT organisations, such as hard to detect rogue clients and noisy neighbours, which cause performance issues that require analysis capabilities beyond the software-only-based monitoring solutions offered by many OEMs. Exacerbating these challenges is the fact that NAS environments are continuously growing and changing, making them increasingly difficult to manage.
As a result, many organisations operating NAS environments don’t have access to comprehensive, accurate and vendor-agnostic real-time monitoring at the protocol level. This lack of comprehensive monitoring means enterprises are unable to optimise the performance, utilisation and health of their NAS deployments, which leads to wasted OpEx and CapEx spending and an inability to meet performance-based SLAs. This also leads to significant wasted staff productivity, as IT support teams struggle to identify root causes of NAS performance issues.
Through the new partnership with Gigamon, Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom platform can now ingest IP network data flows from the Gigamon® GigaVUE® Appliances. As a result, joint customers are now able to gain access to the comprehensive monitoring capabilities of the VirtualWisdom solution to overcome the challenges presented by NAS deployments utilising IP networks, and Virtual Instruments is able to significantly expand its potential market opportunity to include all organisations using NAS, independent of network protocol.
“VirtualWisdom is clearly recognised as a leader in infrastructure performance management,” said Phil Griston, senior director of partner marketing and development, at Gigamon. “Our partnership with Virtual Instruments will give customers effective and efficient access to a comprehensive, real-time NAS monitoring solution, supported by an advanced set of analytics that enable both superior reactive and proactive performance management. The Gigamon Visibility Platform is an ideal solution to help ensure VirtualWisdom has access to all the relevant network packet and flow data it needs to perform optimally.”
Bloor development and governance practice leader David Norfolk added: "Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been one of the infrastructure success stories of the last few years; but at Bloor we are always concerned that it might not be managed as effectively as traditional storage - after all, should one trust any NAS vendor's performance metrics without a bit of "due diligence"? So, we welcome the new partnership of Virtual Instruments with Gigamon. Extending Virtual Instrument's infrastructure performance management into real-time NAS monitoring can only be a good thing for overall performance management, SLA resilience, and effective root cause analysis if there are performance problems. An organisation should not only own the data in a NAS installation but also its associated performance metadata, if it is to claim that it has a well-governed NAS solution."
To further support IT organisations’ monitoring needs for their NAS deployments, Virtual Instruments is adding support for NetFlow IP network monitoring and the SMB protocol to the VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe, which earned the Gold Award in the Storage and SAN Management Tools category of TechTarget’s Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com 2016 Products of the Year Awards. As a result, Virtual Instruments now supports the two predominant file sharing network environments, NFS and SMB, which are the primary protocols upon which large enterprises deploy business-critical applications on NAS. VirtualWisdom now enables holistic visibility from the VM to the LUN or file system.
Key features of the enhanced VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe include:
- The ability to ingest wire-data NAS metrics through compatibility with Gigamon Visibility Solutions;
- Added support for the SMB protocol, which is offered as a simple software upgrade to the current product at no extra charge;
- Added support for NetFlow network traffic flow visibility for IP networks;
- The ability to provide a single performance management solution for both SAN- and NAS-based infrastructures; and
- A complete suite of metrics, alarms, reports and analytics now available for SMB storage, in addition to NFS.
By providing support for both the SMB and NFS protocols, Virtual Instruments is able to ensure that its customers can:
- Accelerate adoption and deployment of NAS implementations;
- Enable performance-based SLAs;
- Optimise OpEx and CapEx investments related to NAS deployments; and
- Improve application availability.
“The partnership with Gigamon, combined with our new NetFlow and SMB monitoring capabilities extend our award-winning NAS Performance Probe to an even broader set of customers,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of products at Virtual Instruments. “Now, for the first time, IT organisations across all industries can proactively ensure the performance and uptime of their complex, multi-vendor NAS deployments from a single console.”
