CloudPhysics Announces Availability of Storage Analytics 

CloudPhysics today announced the general availability of Storage Analytics, new capabilities in the company's flagship product that make it now possible for IT teams to pinpoint and preempt storage-induced capacity and performance problems with data-driven, actionable insight. As a part of today's release, CloudPhysics is introducing Smart Alerts, a groundbreaking new feature that shifts the focus of alerting from reactive to predictive. Using Big Data analytics, CloudPhysics leverages insights from its global dataset to predict capacity or performance problems in a customer's datacenter, triggering a Smart Alert containing recommendations for preemptive actions.

Storage Causes Chronic Pain in the Virtual Datacenter

"IT Ops teams managing virtualized infrastructures face a continuous onslaught of allegations that something is slow and that it is their fault. It turns out in more than 90% of the cases where the infrastructure actually is at fault, the culprit is storage," said Bernd Harzog, Analyst, The Virtualization Practice.

Virtualization transformed IT operations through resource abstraction and workload consolidation. But this abstraction makes IT operations significantly more complex and highly opaque, particularly where virtualization and storage meet. It is now more difficult to understand how things work together, requiring admins to pull, collate and correlate data from several different layers to make operational decisions.

"Storage continues to be an extremely painful resource to manage in virtual environments, and the tools available today fail to provide the visibility, much less the intelligence, to help IT fully understand and easily control its most expensive datacenter resource," said John Blumenthal, co-founder and CEO of CloudPhysics. "With our new release, we've doubled down on storage, providing storage-focused analytics that cut through the layers of complexity and provide answers IT teams need to prevent storage-induced downtime, optimize capacity and keep their virtual datacenters healthy and operating with Google-like operational efficiency."

CloudPhysics Storage Analytics with Smart Alerts Enable Predictive, Proactive Management of Storage Resources

Using its global dataset, CloudPhysics examines metadata and trends from thousands of datacenters and bakes these learnings into the Storage Analytics. These high-resolution performance and capacity analytics run across a customer's entire virtual infrastructure, evaluating the configuration and behavior of storage resources at the datastore, VM and guest level; highlighting potential trouble spots; and pushing recommendations for preventive actions. With Storage Analytics, IT ops can:

• Immediately diagnose storage performance culprits, reducing by 10x the amount of time it takes to find and fix problems
• Pre-empt storage-induced performance and capacity disruptions, helping eliminate storage-related downtime, which accounts for 58% of datacenter downtime overall
• Proactively manage datastores with deep health checks, ensuring proper setup and preventing waste
• Determine the efficacy of SSD caching on virtual workloads prior to making a purchase
• Create custom storage analytics and reporting for interactive exploration, root cause analysis, and ongoing management

Smart Alerts: Data-Driven Early Warning System

Today's Storage Analytics release introduces CloudPhysics' unique Smart Alerts. Other virtualization management products trigger alerts based on a "dumb," often arbitrary number or static threshold, creating significant noise about events that have already taken place. In contrast, CloudPhysics Smart Alerts are analytics-driven and change the focus from reactive to preemptive troubleshooting. CloudPhysics evaluates all objects in the virtual datacenter against certain criteria (e.g., latency, duration, outstanding IOs, IOPS, etc.) and triggers Smart Alerts based on thresholds derived dynamically from patterns and trends observed across our global dataset. As a result, users know ahead of time when conditions are degrading and why it matters, and receive specific recommendations for preemptive measures to take.

"Admins have become inured to the hyperactive alerting and false positives generated by monitoring and management tools available today," said Irfan Ahmad, CloudPhysics co-founder and CTO. "Instead of looking in the rear-view mirror, CloudPhysics uses Big Data to generate truly meaningful alerts that help organizations get ahead of impending disruption. We're excited to introduce our first Smart Alerts with this release and look forward to rolling out even more functionality in the coming months."