For enterprise IT leaders, managing storage in their data centers has always presented challenges, particularly as user requirements have expanded and virtualization has become mainstream. Legacy storage systems have become more and more expensive and difficult to manage – and some vendors require customers to support three different operating systems for three different tiers of storage.
To address those challenges, two years ago Nimble Storage introduced InfoSight™ – powerful and free analytical software, built into every Nimble array, that provides unprecedented visibility into and control over your organization’s storage infrastructure.
With InfoSight, Nimble Storage has redefined the entire experience of managing and supporting storage. With the principles of simplicity, seamlessness, and intuitiveness top-of-mind from day one, we’ve built a powerful data sciences-based infrastructure that takes customers out of the reactive, time-consuming and error-prone experience typical of legacy storage systems.
InfoSight instead frees up valuable IT resources. It intelligently automates much of the storage lifecycle management and support process, proactively diagnosing and resolving potentially harmful issues, providing expert guidance on resource planning, and enabling detailed visibility into overall storage health through a single, cloud-connected portal.
Now we’ve enhanced InfoSight with the ability to view and control your Nimble arrays at the per-VM level, adding a new level of granularity to your big-picture overview.
InfoSight Per-VM Monitoring Capabilities
Given today’s imperative for blazing IT performance, customers are rightly concerned about how to best monitor latencies on their storage arrays. For instance, many organizations have found that as their VMware virtual machine environments have grown, so have resource contention issues and performance dips and spikes.
To really understand and control these kinds of performance issues, you need more data than just the latency from the host perspective. You need to know what factors correlate to the latency throughout the entire data path: the host, VMDKs, datastores, hypervisor, real compute hardware, networking, storage – everything. Storage monitoring and management tools typically don’t have the full picture of what’s contributing to latency through the entire stack, and that correlation of factors is hugely important.
That’s why we’re excited to announce that InfoSight can now monitor performance and latency across the entire VMware virtualization stack. This per-VM visibility, through powerful new visualizations, lets enterprise IT organizations optimize workload performance and proactively identify, isolate and address any potential resource contention issues, well before service level agreements are impacted.
This is a major step forward in helping our customers proactively maintain peak storage health in VMware environments.
You can learn more, and hear from a couple of customers about how InfoSight has changed their storage experience, at a live webinar this Thursday April 16th at 11:00am PST, moderated by noted industry analyst Howard Marks.
For a more technical deep dive into the topic of VM-level performance visibility, here’s a short video I put together with Storage Switzerland analyst and IT expert George Crump.
InfoSight’s per-VM monitoring provides a granular overview of your storage infrastructure as it changes, like this series of microscopic images of rubidium atoms that have been cooled to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, causing the individual atoms to condense into a “superatom” behaving as a single entity.
