Cloud Computing

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According to the 2012 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, 63 percent of organizations plan to increase IT budgets for cloud computing initiatives over the next 12 months. The Cloud Era is here, yet the management of that shared, dynamic infrastructure remains a substantial barrier for organizations to maximize its value. Traditional management solutions do not provide the level of precision, continuous insights or scalability needed to manage these environments, resulting in:

  • Contention storms affecting system performance that cannot be captured by post-mortem database driven monitoring systems;
  • Compartmentalized performance monitoring that doesn’t reveal contention points across the entire infrastructure; and
  • A lack of visibility for capacity issues and planning resulting in future contention storms.

These constraints of traditional management systems represent a significant barrier to organizations that plan on delivering cloud services (public or private) and those who plan on leveraging the cloud for scaling up their mission-critical applications. Ultimately, both cloud providers and their customers need to have a model that provides measurable guarantees in terms of performance assurance or else the addressable opportunity for cloud applications will remain largely reserved for test and development.

Xangati provides the solution to these challenges with its performance management solutions for virtualization and the cloud. Xangati’s VI and VDI Dashboards enable a cloud provider to
manage server virtual machines and hosted desktops. The Xangati product suite is the only solution that live and continuously tracks the performance health of all the critical infrastructure components impacting performance including: datastores, network segments, server VMs, hypervisors/hosts and applications.

To learn more, read the tabs below.

Proactive Performance Assurance

The business customer is looking at an integrated high-performance service for their applications and as such it should be opaque to them in terms of how the intra-dynamics of the cloud works However, the challenge for managing dynamic cloud environments is that the concepts of classic IT silos e.g. network, server, storage do not apply, but they have not been given the wherewithal to manage their environment in any other way. This is where Xangati comes into the picture with a 360-degree cross-silo approach for live and continuously tracking all the moving parts that comprise the cloud. It is only through a solution that actually tracks the performance health of all the critical components of the cloud second by second that cloud providers can provide the performance assurance their customers expect.

Leveraging Xangati’s memory-driven performance health engine, the XMD product suite enables the cloud operations staff to have a to-the-second pulse on the health of their environment. When there is a contention storm that arises the Xangati solution will immediately notify an administrator when a performance shift occurs and pinpoint which specific cross silo element is suffering a contention storm. This is in direct contrast to other performance management solutions built on a database-driven model which will only alert administrators about issues after the fact.

Problem Resolution

According to industry analyst firm, The Yankee Group, 90% of the time to problem resolution is in identifying the source of the problem. To that end, Xangati’s unique live and continuous UI with DVR recordings is the solution to this challenge. When there are shifts in performance health in a cloud environment, the Xangati solution is unrivaled with its ability pair an alert with the precise multi-dimensional “DVR” recording of the contention storm(s) impacting a specific object (e.g. a VM, a datastore, etc.)

It is only through these recordings that the problem silo e.g. network, storage etc. is clearly identified along with the set of interactions are driving the contention. These DVR recordings can also be shared with others in the cloud operations organization if the areas of contention can be clearly remediated by a specific part of the operational staff. The result of deploying Xangati is that organizations are reducing their time to resolution by over 70%.

Capacity Management

The whole concept of the cloud is that it creates a flexible framework to rapidly scale up deployments. That is certainly how the end-customer looks at this computing environment. However from a cloud provider vantage point they have to be fairly judicious about the capital investments they make. Ideally the cloud operations team is making just-in-time investments to scale up to add more infrastructure as opposed to sitting on underutilized capacity.

The Xangati performance management solutions have integrated capacity management functionality to address this challenge for cloud servers, storage AND network in one solution.

Xangati dashboards have a capacity health index that will alert administrators as to when and where they will need capacity.

These capacity alerts will detail out for the administrator what the growth patterns are for key infrastructure components and will forecast specifically when critical thresholds will be hit and when the environment will specifically run out of capacity. The predictive capabilities are coupled with capacity optimization features that allow you to identify areas for optimization including which resources are most underutilized.