storage ICT
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http://dcseurope.info/n/sgfv
Virtualize better with Emulex
Eliminate the risk of virtualizing business critical applications. By Jason Phippen, Senior Director EMEA Marketing & Alliances at Emulex.
I
love innovative and sophisticated software that drives business value, is easy to work with and demonstrates quick customer return. It makes life so much easier when words like “that’s tremendous!!” and “I don’t believe it can do this so easily” are used to describe your product. The product generating these words is OneCommand™ Vision. Emulex OneCommand™ Vision is like the Swiss Army Knife of I/O management.
So let’s pick one area that OneCommand™ Vision is causing words like “tremendous” to be used, outline the problem and detail how this product becomes a “must have” to the IT department.
Virtualization
As a company that is deploying server virtualization to reduce cost and improve business efficiency, you are doing the smart thing. In the physical server environment, you were allowing CPU, memory, storage I/O and network I/O resources to go unused, and thus not wasting your operational expenditure supporting and managing these unused resources.
So virtualizing servers is a good thing, right? And life is good? For many companies like yours, this is not quite the reality. Server virtualization has proven its ability to reduce capital and operational expenses, but unfortunately many companies stop there, forgetting the need to provide fast and efficient data delivery (storage I/O performance) for critical business applications. Unlike physical server environments, this is no longer just the simple case of throwing new storage hardware at the problem.
Here’s the issue: server virtualization consolidates a number of physical servers, each capable of servicing an individual application’s I/O requirements, together onto a smaller number of physical hosts better utilizing resources such as memory, CPU, power, and cooling I/O. The challenge, however, comes when the I/O generated by all virtual hosts consumes all the available I/O resources and becomes a major management and, more importantly, business issue. Troubleshooting these I/O performance issues is complicated and time-consuming even for the most skilled IT staff, with resolution of issues taking days or even weeks. Traditional storage vendor tools do very little to help here as they do not provide the business applications view of I/O performance.
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www.dcseurope.info I June 2012
Emulex OneCommand™ Vision This is where Emulex puts a smile on the IT manager’s face. As the I/O connectivity provider of choice to 9 of the top 10 server and storage vendors, we know I/O. With Emulex OneCommand™ Vision, you can know the I/O performance of existing physical environment and proactively avoid I/O contention often experienced after migrating to virtualized infrastructures. We monitor performance that matters, the “Application View”: £ Of storage I/O performance £ Of storage Path redundancy / availability
And we are immensely cost effective. ROI can be, and for many customers has been, immediate. Here’s what folks are saying, “Without Emulex OneCommand™ Vision, you cannot tell if your application slowdown or virtual server migration deployment stall is caused by storage or not.”
How it Works
Applications need data, make requests for it, and wait for responses. How long this whole process takes can vary, and when I/O contention occurs, it can be difficult to pinpoint the problem for rapid resolution. OneCommand™ Vision’s unique application perspective often results in an immediate ROI because it quickly determines if storage I/O is working well or not.
Figure 1 – I/O management flow diagram
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