Reinventing hybrid infrastructure management

The modern hybrid data centre model has taken full hold in the enterprise sector, which has led organisations to re-evaluate their entire approach to infrastructure management. Enterprises must now make a wide range of considerations in the ongoing management of their hybrid IT infrastructure, including evaluating their best execution venue, as well as the efficacy of automation technologies based on AI and machine learning. Given these factors, devising an effective hybrid infrastructure management strategy is challenging enough, but enterprises must also navigate the overwhelming scale and complexity associated with these highly virtualised, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Traditionally, most enterprises have implemented monitoring tools in a siloed fashion, largely as a result of adopting new technology platforms, resulting in an incomplete view of the performance, health and utilisation of the underlying infrastructure supporting their mission-critical applications. This limited visibility leads to a lack of control over application delivery, which results in poor business performance in the form of unmet service level agreements (SLAs), as well as costly reactive firefighting that is the hallmark of traditional “IT war rooms.”       

By holistically monitoring, analysing and optimising the performance, availability, capacity and efficiency of hybrid IT infrastructure within the context of the application, VirtualWisdom enables enterprises to take a modernised, AIOps-empowered approach to infrastructure management. VirtualWisdom discovers and maps applications to the infrastructure to understand where each application lives and how it behaves on top of the infrastructure, in addition to discerning the business value and SLA tier of each application. The new VirtualWisdom then applies real-time, AI-based analytics through the updated WisdomAI engine, including machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems. As a result, VirtualWisdom delivers the capabilities enterprises need to proactively manage the hybrid infrastructure supporting their mission-critical applications.

“Considering enterprises’ persistent need for today’s mission-critical enterprise applications to be available at all times, infrastructure issues must be resolved in near real-time to avoid impacting the business and its customers,” said Bob Laliberte, Practice Director and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “AIOps is rapidly becoming enterprises’ path to managing the exponentially increasing scale and complexity of their hybrid infrastructures, but enterprises need to be able to implement AIOps-based monitoring solutions within the context and flow of their business.The new VirtualWisdom will help enterprises apply the machine intelligence and expert systems needed to reap the benefits of AIOps-supported hybrid infrastructure management.”

In addition to the expansion of the WisdomAI engine, the latest version of VirtualWisdom offers a wide range of new features and capabilities for capacity management and forecasting, as well as workload balancing and rightsizing. The new VirtualWisdom Workload Right Sizer enables customers to right-size VMs by scaling them up or down across an entire cluster or application, which helps assure service delivery and business value. The new Workload Drift Analyser determines when anomalous or changes in application workload behavior is the cause behind observed performance issues. It also delivers real-time alerts to help IT and operations managers proactively rebalance the workloads.   

Key features of the new VirtualWisdom include:

·       VirtualWisdom Workload RightSizer:The most intelligent VM placement analytic in the industry rightsizes VMs by scaling them up or down across an entire application, helping assure service delivery and business value. Customers can set different policies per tier; control the amount of CPU and memory for each VM, host or cluster; analyse utilisation and over-subscription; and make better decisions via richer, more granular data. 

·       Workload Drift Analyser:Determines when changes in application workload behavior is anomalous or, as a result of application changes, is the root-cause of the performance issues observed. Delivers real-time alerts to restore workload balance and application performance. 

·       Dell EMC Isilon Integration:Assures Isilon cluster performance at scale by bringing industry-leading performance analysis to Dell EMC Isilon environments. The new integration has been validated against the world’s largest production Isilon clusters monitoring hundreds of nodes in a single VirtualWisdom instance. VirtualWisdom maps application dependencies to Isilon clusters, and nodes; collecting and storing over 1500 metrics at 10-second granularity; and delivering unparalleled scale and fidelity.

·       Predictive Capacity Management:Monitors, reports, forecasts and alarms against the capacity consumption rate.   The Capacity Forecast alarm allows customers to specify how many days, weeks or months they wish to be notified prior to potential capacity exhaustion on nodes or clusters.

·       Updated VirtualWisdom Proactive Dashboards:Deliver Smart Charts with support for annotation, linking, and smart naming; and live topology views that are specific to infrastructure or applications.

“The future of IT operations is autonomous: enterprises need IT operations that never fail to deliver mission-critical services, that adapt to business innovation, and consume resources ever more efficiently,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of products at Virtual Instruments. “As the scope of enterprises’ hybrid infrastructure management needs has expanded, we have continued to expand the breadth of our monitoring and inject meaningful AIOps capabilities into the VirtualWisdom platform. With the new VirtualWisdom, we are enabling enterprises to truly harness the power of AI and machine learning, with a view towards the automated IT operations of tomorrow.”