Virtual Instruments, the San Jose, Calif.-based provider of IT infrastructure performance monitoring solutions, today announced the release of its new VirtualWisdom Network Attached Storage (NAS) Performance Probe, extending the company’s analytics-driven technology beyond its storage area network (SAN) roots.
Having already made a name for itself in the market for Fibre Channel (FC) SAN monitoring solutions, the company turned its attention to NAS environments and their unique performance issues. They include noisy neighbors, Network File System (NFS) metadata bottlenecks, rogue clients and other problems that crop up as organizations change their usage patterns, NAS devices degrade or upgrades go awry.
The new offering arrives nearly six months after the company announced it was merging with storage performance analytics specialist Load DynamiX. Today, the process of integrating the two companies is “essentially complete,” reported Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Virtual Instruments.
Entering the NAS market “grows our TAM [total addressable market] by 50 percent,” Rosenthal told InfoStor. It enables the company to target NAS-reliant industries, including pharmaceutical, oil and gas, media and entertainment and electronic design automation (EDA). According to an IDC forecast, the FC SAN market will be worth $12.8 billion by 2019. The NAS market, meanwhile, is poised to reach $6.3 billion.
Although FC SANs are still the to-go technology for enterprise storage environments, NAS is picking up steam, Rosenthal said. “More and more mission critical applications are being deployed on NAS.”
Virtual Instruments’ new NAS Performance Probe uses the company’s analytics-enabled platform to help storage administrators quickly unearth the root cause of a performance issue and enforce service-level agreements from a single real-time monitoring platform, an otherwise time-consuming task if IT workers are juggling a multitude of vendor-specific monitoring and troubleshooting toolkits. The platform’s predictive analytics also allow organizations to head off problems that cause downtime, said Rosenthal.
Available starting today in a 2U appliance, the NAS Performance Probe provides full 10G line rate monitoring of NAS protocols on 16 concurrent ports. A typical configuration costs $123,000, according to the company.
Currently, the solution supports NFSv3 but the company is planning to add SMBv3 (Server Message Block) and NFSv4 support next year via a software update. The probe captures workload and response time metrics for each and every read and write operation and delivers health and performance information for each server and client.
Administrators can examine those metrics using VirtualWisdom 5.0’s new, more user-friendly interface.
Also announced today VirtualWisdom 5.0 features a new dark theme that is optimized for widescreen viewing. Apart from supporting the new NAS monitoring capabilities, enhancements include a 10X improvement in SAN fabric discovery speeds, Seasonal Trend alerting and a workload analytics capability that allows organizations to test proposed changes to their storage infrastructures, courtesy of an integration with Load DynamiX Enterprise.