Virtual Instruments Names Barry Cooks Vice President of VirtualWisdom Software Engineering

Former VMware Engineering Executive to Lead Development of Industry-Leading Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Solutions


SCOTTS VALLEY, CA--(Marketwire - March 23, 2009) - Virtual Instruments, a leader in virtual infrastructure optimization, today announced that VMware veteran Barry Cooks has joined the company as vice president of software engineering. Cooks will lead the Virtual Instruments' software development team and ensure the innovation, quality and timeliness of the VirtualWisdom and NetWisdom performance optimization solutions. He will also manage the efforts aimed at software integration with technology and OEM partners.

News Highlights

--  Cooks brings nearly 15 years of systems and enterprise software
    experience to his new role at Virtual Instruments.
--  Before Virtual Instruments, Cooks served as senior director of
    research and development at VMware. He was responsible for the successful
    development of VMware's availability software, including some of VMware's
    most innovative software, such as VMware Fault Tolerance, the host-based
    replication engine for disaster recovery, VMware High Availability and
    VMware vCenter Data Recovery.
--  Prior to joining VMware in 2006, Cooks was a director of engineering
    at Sun Microsystems, where he was responsible for the Solaris core
    technology team delivering numerous features into the Solaris operating
    system, including DTrace, the Predictive Self-Healing architecture, support
    for 64bit AMD and Intel hardware, InfiniBand integration, and a highly
    performing TCP/IP stack known as project FireEngine. Cooks was also
    responsible for numerous virtualization efforts at Sun, including network
    virtualization aka Crossbow, Xen on Solaris, and support for Linux zones on
    Solaris.
--  He holds a M.S. in computer science from the University of Oregon and
    a B.S. in computer science from Purdue University.
    

Quotes

From Mark Urdahl, CEO, Virtual Instruments: "Barry's track record of successfully delivering innovation coupled with his deep knowledge of virtualization, both at VMware and Sun Microsystems, make him the ideal person to lead the development of VirtualWisdom, our new game-changing, non-intrusive, agent-less solution for virtual infrastructure performance optimization."

From Barry Cooks, Vice President of Software Engineering at Virtual Instruments: "Virtual Instruments has shown real innovation and a deep understanding of how to extract critical real-time performance and utilization metrics from virtualized data centers. VirtualWisdom, which directly adds SAN I/O intelligence to VMware, is the missing 3rd leg of the stool that is required to optimize the performance of virtualized applications. Having information about CPU and memory utilization for virtual machines is useful, but insufficient to deploy virtualized business-critical applications, which tend to be highly I/O intensive. I look forward to leveraging my experience at VMware to propel VirtualWisdom as an essential component of every virtual data center."

About Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments offers the award-winning NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom virtual infrastructure optimization solutions that provide deep monitoring and analysis of how the virtualized IT infrastructure and SAN affect business-critical application performance. Customers such as Barclay's Card Services, Kaiser Permanente and McKesson Corp. achieve significant cost savings in virtualization and SAN deployments by optimizing utilization, performance and availability of IT resources. Leading system and storage vendors including IBM, HP and EMC leverage Virtual Instruments to design and optimize SAN solutions for enterprise customers. The company was founded in June 2008 via a spin-out from Finisar Corp.; it has headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., and can be found online at http://www.virtualinstruments.com.

Contact Information: Contact Info: Elizabeth Hilton Eastwick Communications 650-480-4018 ehilton@eastwick.com

Barry Cooks, Vice President of Software Engineering at Virtual Instruments