Infrastructure Performance Analytics (IPA)

Transcription

1 Infrastructure Performance Analytics (IPA) Optimizing Systemic Performance, Health, and Utilization and Enabling Federal IT to Help Government Agencies Accomplish their Missions FEDERAL WHITEPAPER

2 Federal IT Agility Challenges: Cost, Complexity, Convergence Technological and application trends, such as big data, storage and server growth, mobile applications, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and software-defined everything, are the biggest disrupters of mission-critical IT today. The resultant pressure on federal IT management organizations is to deliver 24x7 dial tone service levels that align with agency demands for availability and performance, while remaining ever agile to meet continually evolving application service delivery and mission requirements. Compounding the complexity and risk of this new normal state of mission-critical infrastructures are complex interdependencies and technological advances. They lead to blindingly fast servers, converging infrastructure components, mass adoption of virtualization, and rapid migration to the private cloud. The key drivers behind all of these trends are demands for anytime/anywhere application access and flawless performance from any device. These factors exponentially increase storage requirements, mobile data, and IP traffic and servers, while fueling advances in new technologies. The result is a never-ending pace of rapid transformation and explosive increase in complexity and risk. Data managed within enterprise datacenter Storage growing from 0.8zb in 2009 to 35zb in 2020 Mobile Data traffic growth from mobile devices IP traffic growth Servers worldwide growth Source: 2011 and 2012 Cisco VNI, EMC and IDC The New Normal 50x 44x 26x The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative increasingly requires an agency s entire digital landscape from server to storage fabric and arrays to be virtualized and abstract. As a result, clear visibility into performance and issue resolution are ongoing challenges. As federal data centers with multi-vendor, multi-layer data center architectures and contracts perpetually change, views from the user, administrator, and application are increasingly de-coupled from the actual physical architectures. Thus, a clear and unbiased understanding of physical infrastructures, applications dependent on them, and their performance is difficult to achieve. Moreover, this new normal state makes it nearly impossible to manage with confidence and operate more efficiently. These circumstances are creating inherent gaps in visibility that must be addressed to achieve the real-time situational awareness needed to better guide agency IT decisions, stay within budget, and remain ever agile. 15x 10x 2020 Summary Federal IT Agility Challenges: Mission-critical federal IT application delivery infrastructures are being virtualized at a breakneck pace and are increasingly abstract and complex. Agile development means changes are continual, and these same infrastructures are required to deliver a flawless end-user experience characterized by hyper-responsive performance and availability. Impediments to Aligning IT with Mission Goals: Barriers preventing IT from delivering mission-aligned service levels include a lack of the right people, processes, and technology and the leveraging of old technologies that weren t built to handle today s complex and ever-changing infrastructure. Infrastructure Performance Analytics (IPA): IPA is a platform category for managing the physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure; it helps ensure federal IT value. Capabilities Required in an IPA Platform: Key IPA requirements include continuous, real-time, system-wide data collection from heterogeneous IT infrastructures, combined with unbiased correlation and analysis. Benefits of an IPA platform: IPA delivers ROI to federal agencies for CAPEX and OPEX savings, ensuring optimal budget alignment. IPA also guarantees performance, mitigates risk, and aligns federal IT infrastructures with agency application and mission requirements. Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom4 : This comprehensive IPA platform provides 360 o visibility into the performance, health, and availability of the IT infrastructure.

3 Managing the New Normal It is now critical for federal IT organizations to have a purpose-built Infrastructure Performance Analytics (IPA) agency-wide platform. Federal organizations require a platform that is specifically designed for granular, real-time monitoring of performance throughout the infrastructure supporting missioncritical applications Microsoft Exchange, EMR, Claims Processing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs), and agency processes. IT management teams want to rely on a platform that assures system-wide performance and availability. This platform should enable infrastructure teams whether they are focused on servers, storage, virtualization, or performance to derisk mission-critical workloads across physical, virtual, and cloud-based computing environments. At the same time, IPA should provide deep insight into the real-time performance of the IT infrastructure, so the risk of virtualizing and delivering new applications, as well as deploying new technologies, can be minimized. Leveraging IPA would allow federal IT departments to align with application requirements and agency demands, becoming a trusted partner in driving better organizational decisions to accomplish their missions. Impediments to Aligning IT Organizations with Government Agency Goals Minding and Managing the Gaps Three main factors people, processes, and technology can prevent federal IT organizations from achieving a state of maturity and alignment in which the broader agency community perceives them as subject matter experts with the situational awareness and ability to deliver exacting, costoptimized service levels. People and Organizational Structure: The IT organization itself can impact mission alignment, particularly if resources and management are functionally segmented. For example, organizations are often divided into application, server, network, and storage administration areas. When a performance problem arises, the various administrators tend to make sure that it is not occurring in their specific domain. This structure pits teams against each other and results in finger pointing. This predicament is worsened by device-specific system administration tools that focus on only one component of the IT infrastructure. When it comes to interrelated and interdependent systems, without a holistic and unbiased view of the environment, it is nearly impossible proactively manage and ensure performance let alone quickly find root causes of problems or set accurate SLAs. Process and IT Maturity: IT organizations are forever focused on providing budget-based service levels, but many lack the processes or metrics necessary to fully realize their commitments. The reasons range from a lack of executive sponsorship, to over-allocated or misallocated resources, to little or no institutionalized collaboration processes. In all cases, teams must focus on finding and resolving specific problems. However, in many cases, they lack the proper instrumentation and processes for fast and conclusive resolution. Many IT teams work hard to focus on aligning their operations with agency goals. This frequently results in being more of a hope than a reality. Without continuing executive commitment to people and processes that are backed by accurate data, it is tough to achieve alignment. Having uniform processes in place, especially when there are multiple stakeholders with different reporting structures, incentives and goals, often proves impossible to maintain. Yesterday s Technology and Tools Managing Today s Complexity: Systems management tools have traditionally focused on specific infrastructure components like provisioning and monitoring server resources, managing storage capacity, or utilization of the storage and network fabric. In most cases, these legacy device-specific tools have been marketed as performance monitoring, even though they only monitor utilization. Neither singularly nor combined do these tools provide the necessary and comprehensive performance information that application, server, storage, and cloud administrators need to understand how their mission-critical infrastructures are actually performing. They lack real-time performance metrics like infrastructure response times for executing actions and efficiency in transporting data. They have scalability limitations, are often agent-based and vendor-biased. These cobbled together toolsets are used to show that the overall IT environment is working fine, with the right capacities and resources provisioned. However, if application response is poor, related IT service levels are still deemed unsatisfactory. A Moment of Clarity: Performance versus Utilization: Infrastructure monitoring tools use utilization metrics to imply the potential impact on performance. Since they are not measuring true performance, teams can overprovision resources to ensure that utilization doesn t impact performance. However, inferring performance while spending money to concretely over-provision is no longer acceptable. This is not an option in taxpayerfunded, budget-constrained organizations. The

4 days of over-provisioning to ensure performance are gone since it is no longer technically viable with hyper data growth and accompanying cost pressures especially when the fundamental promise of virtualization and the cloud is to drive down costs, operate more efficiently, and achieve greater utilization against existing assets. Requirements for IT to be Ever-Agile: Another important factor placing everything at risk is the ever-changing IT infrastructure landscape. Systems management tools were originally designed for monitoring individual physical elements, but the advent of virtualization and cloud architectures made those tools neither appropriate nor terribly useful for managing the interrelated complexities. The continued virtualization and abstraction of the infrastructure and underlying physical elements make performance management, problem avoidance, root cause problem analysis, and remediation of physical elements all the more difficult. the device-specific management tools of yesterday to change if they can. In the past, management tools focused on capacity, utilization, and management of individual physical components. With the move to virtualization, cloud, and new deployment models, Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) have been trying to extend and fill in for what s missing. The challenge is that no single aspect delivers a holistic view of the underlying IT infrastructure, much less provides enough in the way of situational context. Despite all these different tools that address device, application and network performance, a huge gap still exists in understanding system-wide performance. IPA: Defined Infrastructure Performance Analytics provides the ability to continuously capture, correlate and analyze in real-time the system-wide performance, utilization and health of heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. Ultimately, IPA delivers the comprehensive visibility and definitive insights that enable IT to establish and maintain the service levels that the business requires while driving the systems level optimization and agility that is the promise of virtualization and the cloud. IPA: Managing Through Compounding Complexity and Risk to Assure IT Value and Agency Mission Alignment Federal digital infrastructure operations, performance, and management teams are forever under pressure to deliver IT service levels aligned with government agency goals and application performance requirements. In fact, agency processes and application teams often set IT department priorities in terms of availability and performance. Moreover, new IT infrastructure computer models include hybrid environments in which portfolios of applications simultaneously migrate between and reside within physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This results in compounded complexities for monitoring, managing, and reporting necessitating an IPA platform for assuring performance optimizations, operational efficiency, risk mitigation, and sustainable SLAs. Trying to manage through these complexities forces Real-Time IPA Platform Requirements An IPA platform must be able to continuously capture, correlate, and analyze system-wide infrastructure performance, utilization, and health metrics from heterogeneous environments in real-time. It must provide an unbiased view of system-wide infrastructure performance, from virtual machine, to server and switch fabric, to storage array, and all the way down to logical unit number (LUN). And, it must provide definitive insights that are accurate and actionable. Continuous, Granular Monitoring and Measurement: The most important metric for IT Infrastructure performance is infrastructure response time. This is defined as the time it takes for any application running on a physical server or virtual machine to place an (I/O) request and get a response back. In large, highly virtualized and/or cloud infrastructures, several things happen within a five or 20 minute polling interval that should be noted. For any monitoring to be effective, organizations need to capture the minimum, maximum, and average at no greater than one-second intervals for accurate insight into the overall infrastructure performance.

5 Unbiased and Heterogeneous: Government IT infrastructures are heterogeneous by design, with multiple vendors delivering their parts of a complete physical, virtual, and cloud solution. An IPA platform must collect data from various devices without vendor or productspecific bias or dependencies. It must deliver an unbiased, vendor-independent view of the whole system with precise metrics that enable situational understanding and context for what s happening throughout the system. System-Wide Data Collection, Visibility and Analytics: The IPA platform must correlate and analyze metrics from all infrastructure components. This means from the virtual machine, server, fabric, storage arrays and logical unit number. Further, the data must be presented in a way that clearly describes interdependencies in context of systemwide performance. The data must also be persisted, so that it is easy to pinpoint exactly where in time a performance impacting event happen (or where it will happen), and how it affected (or will affect) system overall. The IPA platform must track all granular end-to-end I/O activity across across highly virtualized infrastructures from server transmission, through the switch to storage and back and leverage an analytics framework for contextual understanding, correlation and discovery. Scalability: A typical virtualized federal IT infrastructure is comprised of thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands of switch and storage I/O ports, and petabytes of storage. An IPA platform must be able to handle the large number of installed physical devices and the associated metrics without a hiccup or the risk of hitting a limit. Most legacy device or system management tools struggle with scale by design. Benefits of an IPA Platform: Ensuring Applications and Infrastructure Perform Better Together An IPA platform delivers significant cost, time, and resource savings to government agencies. Operational Efficiency and Effectiveness: Crossdomain system visibility enables comprehensive measurement of the infrastructure performance, from the virtual machine all the way to the storage LUN. Performance bottlenecks can be identified and corrected proactively, before impacting service levels; this results in significantly higher performance and enables higher utilization of existing infrastructure. Additionally, IPA helps IT departments improve infrastructure response times, proactively avoid outages, quickly identify the root cause and remediate performance issues, and drive continuous improvement in reliability. Risk Mitigation: IPA enables highly accurate baselining to help proactively identify the impact of all infrastructure changes. This improves forecasting accuracy, and results are seen in real-time. For example, IT can migrate agency enterprise applications between hybrid environments with much lower risk. Application performance has an interdependent relationship with the infrastructure on which it runs. Different application workloads require different resource quality, and compete for resources with other applications, so it is important to manage the infrastructure accordingly. By leveraging authoritative insights from IPA analytics it is possible to model application performance and ensure that business processes are executing as they should. This is equally applicable whether the change process spans months of engineering design, test and rollout, or as it becomes more real-time in highly automated cloud environments. Agency Mission Alignment: Federal IT department priorities include delivering service levels required by their users and having an agile response as program requirements, mandates, and goals evolve all while optimizing related operational efficiencies and right-sizing infrastructure budgets. IPA enables IT to stay in lock step with agency agility requirements. IT departments can quickly identify root causes while proactively and significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). Budgets are greatly reduced by increasing system-wide utilization, reducing over-provisioning, and making the correct decisions on infrastructure costs versus performance. The IPA platform helps cut through virtualization complexity, accelerate transformation, minimize risks, and move IT management from a perpetual position of reactive response to proactive operations. The IPA Platform: Enabling Federal IT for Ever-Agile Program and Mission Alignment Though it is still important to understand utilization and how it affects performance, it is now essential to understand it within the context of true infrastructure response times. It is critical to understand how the infrastructure is delivering the resources required by the applications relying on it, and if the resources are delivering the right service levels. Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom4 IPA platform was purpose-built from the ground up to address

6 all the challenges and gaps resulting from the circumstances and evolutionary scenarios previously described. It delivers a continuous real-time understanding of application data behavior at the protocol level throughout physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. Whereas other management tools focus on utilization and health at the device layer, the VirtualWisdom4 IPA Platform looks at the entire compute environment from a systems level, focusing on correlation and interdependencies of overall performance, utilization, and health. This systemwide visibility enables federal IT departments to help agencies consolidate redundant applications, avoid waste and duplication, and strengthen IT governance. Leveraging a unique combination of software and hardware probes, the platform persists, correlates and analyzes across a breadth and depth of data never before possible collected The benefits for federal IT departments are multifold. Departments are now enabled with better situational awareness for better-informed IT decisions around architecture, engineering, design, and operations. They now have the means to: Right-size and align infrastructure capacity and resource quality, avoiding wasted resources Drive greater utilization against existing assets and resources Accurately measure I/O traffic, correlate systemwide data, monitor trends Improve infrastructure response times Proactively, efficiently, and quickly identify and remediate problems Deliver the right level of performance at the appropriate cost Establish SLAs aligned with agency mission requirements Effectively partner with and contribute to the success of the agency s mission and activities The VirtualWisdom Platform captures, persists, correlates and analyzes an unprecedented breadth and depth of data providing comprehensive visibility and definitive insights. from throughout the complex, end-to-end digital infrastructure of the agency. This highly accurate and comprehensive solution enables customers to stop reactive troubleshooting, proactively start managing performance in real-time and achieve cost optimization or Value Engineering goals. VirtualWisdom4 Responsive User Interface Analyze systems, equipaent, facilities, services and supplies to ensure essential functions to meet specified Value Engineering (VE) goals at the lowest life cycle cost possible at required levels of performance VirtualWisdom Platform Architecture At its most essential, the VirtualWisdom Platform is composed of a fully integrated combination of VirtualWisdom4 Management Software, and the purpose-built Platform Appliance. This powerful combination of hardware and software, all fully developed, integrated and environment-tested inhouse at Virtual Instruments, ensures the highest levels of performance, scalability and serviceability. The VirtualWisdom4 intuitive interface broadens the value of the VirtualWisdom4 solution to the entire organization, from IT operations to agency activity decision makers. With it, they can effectively perform comprehensive analysis, collaborate, and make informed decisions based on definitive insights about how applications and infrastructure are performing.

7 DEV CH 1 SW CH 2 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 L7 L8 L9 L10 L11 L12 L13 L14 L15 L16 L17 L18 L19 L20 L21 L22 L23 L24 PWR SYS NET USE USE LOC SYS PWR The dynamic, entity-centric UI enables multiple teams to quickly and confidently answer questions and deliver the right information at the right time. The VirtualWisdom4 UI provides a time-correlated, cross-domain view of the performance, utilization, and health of the system as a whole, based on the deep, granular metrics available from the probes. The UI is entirely configurable, so the display and reports can be presented in a defined context that fits with the department or agency operational process. It also provides for integration with third-party products and other management frameworks. This means regardless of function, (application, server, storage, virtualization, etc.) any agency can collaboratively fine-tune its infrastructure performance based on its own particular mission, application, workload, or SLA requirements. The VirtualWisdom4 User Interface is made up of four key elements: Intelligent Topology Insight at a Glance Array ProbeNTAP VirtualWisdom4 introduces ProbeNTAP as the first of many storage array software probes that will help provide agency performance teams the additional visibility into how the storage array is impacting the end-to-end system performance. ProbeNTAP is an API-based NAS storage software probe that collects and correlates health and utilization data from the underlying NAS arrays (NetApp OnTAP8 Clustered Systems). SAN Performance Probes: ProbeFC8 Family ProbeFC8-HD Case Based Alarms Relevant and Actionable Live Reports Intuitive and Dynamic Applied Analytics Turning Data into Answers! Virtual Server ProbeVM Family The ProbeVM Family of software-based probes collect and present hundreds of performance and utilization metrics from the associated physical server and hypervisor estate including CPU utilization and status, memory utilization, disk I/O requests and capacity, as well as network requests and utilization. The current release of VirtualWisdom4 and the ProbeVM family support VMware vsphere, IBM PowerVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments, presenting hundreds of performance and utilization metrics from across the virtual estate. The metrics are persisted and correlated with data from other VirtualWisdom probes and infrastructure data to build a complete picture of the end-to-end system for each virtual machine or physical server. Storage Network ProbeSW This standards-based software probe leverages SMI-S and SNMP to collect extensive metrics from the Fibre Channel Switching infrastructure (regardless of manufacturer or type of switch), from director class to top of tack FCoE, embedded gateway or other FC Standard switching devices. ProbeFC8-HD48 ProbeFC-16G-24 Our family of hardware-based SAN Performance Probes are the most advanced, high capacity linerate data inspection and analysis devices available. They inspect, process and analyze every FC frame header and SCSI Command on the Fibre Channel SAN links in real-time. They capture the true, unaltered, I/O profile of the actual application traffic, detecting application performance slowdowns and transmission errors by measuring every SCSI I/O transaction from start to finish. The SAN Performance Probe family consists of an (8G) 16-port model, an ultra high-density (8G) 48-port enterprise edition, and a (16G) 24-port model suited for high-growth environments. This product family delivers the full range of cost and density options customers require. SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System ProbeFC-16G-24 Traffic Access Points (TAPs) provide a passive, failsafe access point to Fibre Channel network traffic on the TAPped link. This makes the data light available for real-time performance monitoring, deep problem diagnosis and protocol layer analysis. TAPs are

8 non-powered, non-mechanical devices that reflect a small portion of the signal through the TAP to another port, which provides a copy of the light to upstream, out of band probes. The passive TAP does not introduce any latency or overhead, has no impact on application or SAN performance, and is integrated with several industry leading Fibre Channel Patch Panel Systems for easy and simple deployment. Delivering on the Promise of Program Agility and Mission Alignment While transitions to virtualized and cloud environments help improve agility and reduce government agency CAPEX COST growth in physical hardware, RISK they don t address the increasing complexity and CYCLE TIME interdependence driving increased CAPEX and OPEX in software and staff. In fact, there s often a corollary risk of revenue impact from unacceptable performance or even downtime. The unintended consequences of aggressive consolidation, migration, and new technology adoption is increased risk without demonstrable improvements in cost or cycle time, PERFORMANCE whether or not the agency AVAILABILITY mission is achieved. UTILIZATION For senior agency IT executives or Program Managers, VirtualWisdom4 accelerates federal agency transformation by helping guarantee the benefits of reduced budgets, capital expenditures, operational costs, maximized value of existing assets, and improved program agility. Managing infrastructure performance is the most critical factor for ensuring application performance and in turn, more effective agency activity performance. By directly measuring a comprehensive level of system-wide transaction workflows, VirtualWisdom4 cuts-through the haze of virtualization and cloud to provide an end-to-end view of how applications and infrastructure are performing. This enables agency decision makers to mitigate risk and guarantee performance, at a lower total cost. For federal IT Operations Managers and performance teams, VirtualWisdom4 provides definitive and continuous, real-time measurement of performance, health and utilization across VM, server, network and storage. Performance teams must manage perpetual complexity in their heterogeneous IT infrastructures, and require a sophisticated set of capabilities to measure and ensure agency-wide application performance. The larger the shared server, SAN, and NAS infrastructures, the greater the risk of performance degradation and downtime. This enables them to reduce system-wide latency, proactively prevent outages, and dramatically improve resource utilization. VirtualWisdom4 provides the real-time insights required to flexibly by accurately define and deliver on true application performance requirements. For More Information For more information on Infrastructure Performance Analytics or how VirtualWisdom4 can benefit your organization, please contact us at info@virtualinstruments.com. Sales sales@virtualinstruments.com Training training@virtualinstruments.com Website virtualinstruments.com 05/2016 Virtual Instruments. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. VirtualWisdom, Virtual Instruments, SANInsight, Virtual Instruments Certified Associate, Virtual Instruments Certified Professional, and Virtual Instruments University are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries.