SCOTTS VALLEY, CA--(Marketwire - February 23, 2009) - Virtual Instruments, provider of the award-winning NetWisdom SAN (storage area network) optimization solution, today announced VirtualWisdom. VirtualWisdom is a new solution that provides comprehensive, real-time instrumentation and measurement capabilities that enable IT managers to optimize the performance and availability of their virtualized IT infrastructure. VirtualWisdom adds SAN I/O intelligence to VMware environments, enabling administrators to better balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements of I/O performance. Deployment of VirtualWisdom results in significantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization and significantly lower capital and operational costs associated with an IT organization's systems and storage infrastructure.

"There's urgency in enterprise data centers today to deploy virtualization to improve server utilization and reduce overall IT expenditures. However, broad deployment of virtualization for mission-critical applications has been limited by the lack of visibility into how the networked storage I/O affects the performance of applications deployed on virtual machines," said Mark Bowker, Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst. "The best way to overcome that hurdle is to implement instrumentation and measurement tools within the networked storage infrastructure that extract real-time transaction performance information. Virtual Instruments can provide this view with a comprehensive, real-time performance analysis solution designed to enable virtualization technology to be deployed with confidence across all mission critical workloads."

VMware Monitoring and Auto Correlation

Targeted at enterprises looking to broadly deploy virtualization, VirtualWisdom includes network instrumentation, measurement and analysis tools that are the basis for performance and resource optimization. VirtualWisdom provides real-time and historical insights into application latency and bandwidth consumption, as well as early detection and advanced notification of device failures, congestion, and errors. VirtualWisdom provides real-time performance information from the virtual machine on the server through the host bus adapter (HBA), out through the SAN switch and right to the LUN on the storage array. This unique monitoring and analysis capability allows a baseline characterization before VMware deployment, subsequently improving data center efficiency and eliminating bottlenecks in virtualized and heterogeneous environments.

The new Virtual Instruments ProbeVM collects information specifically about the utilization and performance of virtual machines within the VMware environment. VirtualWisdom correlates information from the ProbeVM with performance data measured directly from the SAN infrastructure to enable IT managers to also consider the storage dimension to proactively balance the provisioning of virtual machines for maximum application performance. This broader and deeper level of visibility makes fine-grained optimization possible, allowing for accelerated VMware infrastructure and higher server consolidation ratios.

New Reconfigurable Dashboards

VirtualWisdom contains a new easily customizable widget-based dashboard that allows system administrators and SAN managers to focus on the specific virtual machine, server, and application I/O data points that matter most to them. The dashboard includes user-definable associations that let administrators easily monitor and correlate key performance metrics among all of the components (including CPUs, memory, Host Bus Adapters, switch ports, storage arrays) that make up the complete I/O path for a specific application. This new dashboard is a dramatic improvement in ease of use and will significantly reduce administrator problem identification and resolution time by enabling true real-time root-cause analysis.

"Over the last two years, enterprises have made significant investments in building out their storage and virtualization infrastructures. In 2009, the focus will be on optimizing the performance of that investment and improving overall data center efficiency with less staff than they had in 2008," said Mark Urdahl, CEO, Virtual Instruments: "VirtualWisdom will be an essential component in enabling IT organizations to deploy virtualization on a broad scale and achieve significantly higher server consolidation ratios. VirtualWisdom will provide unprecedented visibility into their virtualized infrastructure to ensure optimal application response time and maximum data availability."

Product & Service Availability

VirtualWisdom will be available as a software solution for deployment on the customer premises and also included in the two new Virtual Instruments service offerings: Virtual Infrastructure Optimization & Best Practices Service; and Virtual Infrastructure HealthCheck and Scan Service. The service offerings are available immediately and the VirtualWisdom software solution is targeted to be available by June 2009. With these new capabilities, VirtualWisdom is the only solution that delivers the deep infrastructure and I/O visibility needed to optimize storage, server and network resources, detect costly problems before they occur, accelerate virtualization deployments, and help organizations meet their SLA and compliance requirements.

Virtual Instruments will be discussing the new VirtualWisdom solution in an upcoming webinar in conjunction with IDC on March 18th titled "Improving Efficiency in the Virtualized Data Center." Attendees can register for the webinar at www.virtualinstruments.com/webinar.html.

About Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments' NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom solutions monitor application-to-SAN transaction performance -- with deep insight and data not available from other solutions. 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. Leading system and storage vendors including IBM, HP, HDS and EMC leverage NetWisdom to design SAN solutions for enterprise customers. Virtual Instruments was founded in June 2008 via the 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