Press release

Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC, Cisco & SANBlaze Announce that NVMe-oF is Ready for the Enterprise

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Together with Dell
EMC, Cisco
and SANBlaze,
hybrid infrastructure management and AIOps leader Virtual
Instruments today announced that the highly advanced non-volatile
memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage protocol is now ready for
the enterprise. The four NVMe-oF innovators will showcase the complete
ecosystem to accelerate enterprise NVMe-oF adoption – from testing to
deployment – through a collaborative demo at Dell
Technologies World, taking place in Las Vegas from April 29 – May 2,
2019.

NVMe is considered one of the most disruptive innovations in the storage
industry since flash storage, as it promises to reduce latency and
increase performance far beyond existing SAS-based flash systems.
NVMe-oF extends that performance boost over current storage
infrastructures. However, until now, NVMe-oF faced challenges to
widespread adoption in the enterprise sector with limited product
availability and uncertainty with respect to the actual benefits.
Enterprise IT leaders have been facing challenging decisions, including
which workloads will benefit the most, how to select the right products,
and how to mitigate risk during migration due to the limited supporting
ecosystem.

At Dell Technologies World, Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC, Cisco and
SANBlaze will demonstrate how the four companies have collaborated to
eliminate these challenges to make NVMe-oF enterprise-ready. The demo
will simulate an NVMe-based, workload-heavy enterprise environment,
which will consist of the following technologies:

The environment will feature Cisco’s MDS switches, which are sold and
serviced by Dell EMC under the Connectrix MDS brand, connected to Dell
EMC PowerMax arrays, with the massive simulated load generated by the
combination of Virtual Instruments’ WorkloadWisdom storage workload
modeling and analytics, integrated with the SANBlaze VirtuaLUN load
generator. The entire environment will be monitored from end-to-end by
Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom, which will showcase new agentless
integrations to Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming (NVMe-oF), and Dell EMC
NVMe-oF PowerMax that collect, monitor, correlate and analyze from the
application servers, to the PowerMax. Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming
provides on-switch, in-band monitoring of NVMe-oF I/O storage traffic.

By showcasing superior NVMe-oF performance for the enterprise in a fully
tested and monitored environment, the expansive demo will illustrate how
the integrated ecosystem of Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC, Cisco and
SANBlaze is making NVMe-oF viable for enterprise data centers. For
example, the latest Cisco 32Gb MDS switches support both Fibre Channel
and NVMe running in the same chassis, along with SAN Telemetry Streaming
(STS), enabling IT leaders to reduce the risk of migration to NVMe-based
storage such as the latest Dell EMC PowerMax arrays. As a result, the
four companies are poised to help accelerate the adoption of NVMe in the
enterprise for high-performance mission-critical applications.

In addition to Virtual Instruments’ integral role in the multi-company
demo at Dell Technologies World, Virtual Instruments will have a major
presence at the event.

At Virtual Instruments’ booth (#501), there will be interactive demos of
VirtualWisdom and WorkloadWisdom, as well as a showcase of Virtual
Instruments’ highly regarded professional services, including the Cloud
Migration Readiness service and the Infrastructure
Performance Assessment service. In addition, one of Virtual
Instruments’ healthcare customers, Houston Methodist, will lead a
presentation focused on best practices around infrastructure management
for mission-critical applications. Following are details on the session:

  • What: Best Practices for Infrastructure Management for
    Mission-Critical Apps
  • Where:

    • Room: Zeno 4702
    • Dell Technologies World
    • The Venetian
    • 3355 S Las Vegas Blvd
    • Las Vegas, NV 89109
  • When: Wednesday, May 1 from 12 noon to 1pm
  • Who: Trey Jones, director of IT infrastructure services,
    Houston Methodist

To learn more about Virtual Instruments and its hybrid infrastructure
management and AIOps solutions, please visit: https://www.virtualinstruments.com/

To learn more about Dell Technologies World, please visit: https://www.delltechnologiesworld.com/index.htm

Supporting Quotes
“NVMe is the future of high-end data
storage in the enterprise, but as is the case with many emerging
technologies, the cost/performance benefit analysis will be the driver
of enterprise adoption,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president,
product management, Dell EMC. “Our collaboration with Virtual
Instruments, Cisco and SANBlaze will illustrate why enterprises can now
rely on NVMe as the storage foundation of their modern hybrid data
centers.”

“Cisco has been a technology leader for NVMe over FC and Ethernet. NVMe
delivers significant scale, latency/performance improvements, and
overall better storage integration for our data center customers,” said
Thomas Scheibe, VP of product management for Cisco Data Center.
“Together with Virtual Instruments and other ecosystem partners, Cisco
will demonstrate the delivery of FC-NVMe and SAN Insights Streaming on
the Cisco MDS storage switch product line, enabling end-to-end NVMe
connectivity and fabric performance monitoring.”

“Enterprises require end-to-end validation of their storage networks and
systems, and this is especially true of a highly advanced technology
such as NVMe,” said Vince Asbridge, president and CEO of SANBlaze. “By
collaborating with Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC and Cisco, we’re able
to give enterprises the peace of mind they need to forge ahead with
their NVMe deployments.”

“Enterprise IT leaders are eager to evaluate next-generation, NVMe-based
storage systems that can scale to meet the massive performance
requirements for big data, IoT and AI-based applications,” said John
Gentry, CTO and SVP of business development of Virtual Instruments. “But
beyond the performance of NVMe, enterprises rightfully want to be sure
that it is also a cost-effective and low-risk approach for their
mission-critical applications. Through our collaboration with Dell EMC,
Cisco and SANBlaze, we’re able to demonstrate that NVMe is now
enterprise-grade – which enables enterprises to accelerate their digital
transformation initiatives.”

About Virtual Instruments
Virtual Instruments is the leader
in AIOps for hybrid infrastructure management. It provides comprehensive
infrastructure instrumentation and performance analytics for enterprise
data centers. The company’s solutions give IT teams deep workload
visibility and actionable insights into their end-to-end systems across
the hybrid data center. Virtual Instruments empowers companies to
maximize the performance, availability and utilization of their
production IT infrastructure from the data center to the cloud. The
privately held company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more
information, visit https://www.virtualinstruments.com.