Storage area network(SAN)testing supplier Virtual Instruments plans to add monitoring capabilities for AIX and Hyper-V virtual server environments,IBM SVC and EMC VPLEX storage virtualisation products,Fibre Channel over Ethernet,NAS and 16Gbps Fibre Channel native monitoring.
Virtual Instruments'Virtual Wisdom monitoring product currently supports only SANs in VMware environments.The company's products use hardware and software monitoring in the storage fabric and local area network(LAN)to build a picture of server and storage operational efficiency.
The supplier plans to add AIX capability during 2013,with support for other environments to follow that over a period of one to two years.
Virtual Instruments CTO Skip Bacon said at SNW Europe it was listening to customers which mostly had VMware environments but also frequently ran AIX LPARs on IBM P-Series Unix servers.
Regarding support for SVC and VPLEX storage virtualisation hardware,he said:"We can deploy either side of SVC or VPLEX and determine their efficiency in operation,such as cache use,but we could get additional information we can't get to at the moment,such as utilisation levels and mapping by tapping into the hardware."
Bacon cited successful results at customer Unilever when issues thought to be caused at the storage array were in fact in storage virtualisation hardware and had been rectified following Virtual Instruments'analysis.
