Overview

In today’s business environment, a highly available and efficient data center is a competitive advantage. Pressure and expectations on IT have been growing as it evolves from a pure cost center into a way for business to expand its reach to new customers and increase external interaction. IT teams often find it difficult to make data-driven decisions that increase efficiency and lower cost while avoiding the risk of performance problems and application disruptions. The dynamic nature of the modern virtualized data center makes troubleshooting harder and planning even more complex than in the past.

CloudPhysics generates data-driven insights for smarter IT, focusing the power and productivity of big data analytics on key business challenges. CloudPhysics monitors, analyzes, and learns from the collective intelligence of its global data set, and applies those learnings to your data center. Given that hardware and software upgrades are a continuous part of the IT universe, having data that demonstrates where those upgrades are most needed empowers IT with a quantifiable ROI to your annual spend that can be maximized. Furthermore, having data at your finger-

“Using CloudPhysics is like having data scientists and VMware* experts join our

team. They’ve baked years of domain knowledge and

Big Data expertise into how they collect, transform and

analyze operational data, making it easy for our team to gain rich, meaningful and actionable insights to better

manage our virtual infrastructure.”Drew Del Matto, CFO

Fortinet CloudPhysics I/O Contention cards simplify virtual storage management by automatically classifying virtual machines into culprits and victims, saving hours of troubleshooting time. On the other hand, these cards are used for performance planning especially around Intel Flash and NVMe upgrades.

solution BriefCloudPhysics & Intel® Solid State Drive Data Center Family of SSDsData Center Analytics

Always-On Analytics for Dynamic Data CentersOptimizing Infrastructure and Upgrade Spend While Lowering Application Disruption Risk in a Vsphere*-Based Data Center

tips can often provide the facts neces-sary for executives to justify resource increases.These data-based capabilities significantly reduce risk, save costs, drive performance, and enable smarter business decisions - all by empowering IT to be highly proactive.

Introduction

In today’s world of software-defined datacenters, infrastructure is increas-ingly complex, and change is constant. That means the potential for change-related risk to applications is greater than ever before. In spite of the abun-dance of tools available, IT teams lack the ability and the time to study all the known or unknown configuration issues in their vSphere* infrastructure. As the team responsible for service delivery to business units, you often struggle to understand whether changes—intended or accidental—result in poor performance and availability issues waiting to ignite.

Virtualization abstracts the server hard-ware and allows multiple workloads or tenants to share a common set of resources. In a data center this means that powerful server hardware based on Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT) won’t go to waste just because of low utilization - the resources (CPU, mem-ory, I/O, etc.) can be divided, processed in parallel, and dynamically attached or removed. And that means change in a data center is constant, when things go wrong, there’s an inability to replay the changes over time to correlate events or trends that caused the current prob-lem. This creates a significant drag on your effectiveness, especially as you are

thrown into firefighting mode to mini-mize the impact of unexpected applica-tion disruption and related costs.

Advantages of an Analytics-Driven Approach

Analytics are not bound to the immedi-ate present, but rather stretch from the past and into the future, allowing IT administrators to be deliberate and proactive. Analytics add structured context to routine activities as well as the planning of projects. This leads to less work in creating interpretations and decisions from the data. IT analyt-ics tools provide rich noise reduction to reach the signal; and they do so on a reusable basis, resulting in continuous improvements.

CloudPhysics is leading this paradigm shift from reactive monitoring towards proactive and predictive analytics, enabling administrators to preempt emerging hazards. This gives IT teams the confidence to act boldly to improve performance, reduce risk, and improve utilization in their vSphere environments.

CloudPhysics continually analyzes the vSphere environment, track-ing changes, projecting trends, and proactively surfacing the hot spots that need attention right now—before they cause problems. We deliver unique, meaningful insights that give vSphere administrators the confidence to act assertively, minimizing risk and reduc-ing waste, without compromising the safety of the virtual infrastructure or the applications it supports.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Advantages of an Analytics-Driven Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Always-on Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Performance Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Root Cause Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Storage Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Storage Cache Analytics . . . . . . . . . 5

CloudPhysics Platform Highlights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Performance & Scalability . . . . . . . 5

Extensibility & Integration . . . . . . . 5

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

About CloudPhysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

TRADITIONAL IT OPS MGT TOOLS ANALYTICS-DRIVEN IT OPS MGT TOOLS

Reactive Preemptive

Montioring-centric Signal-centric

Fragmented view Contextual view

Alerts after the fact Early warning system

Triggered by disruptions Triggered by analysis

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At the heart of lowering risk is an understanding of change and its impact. CloudPhysics solves problems associated with change by revealing what changed and when. The result is prompt unraveling of human-related errors associated with bad configura-tions or change drift, as well as pre-empting of change-related errors by identifying best practice alignment. The entire organization benefits from reduced risk and greater efficiency through improved productivity and cost savings.

Always-on Analytics• Continuous diagnosis of

infrastructure

• Ongoing “learning” to algorithmically deepen insights

• Configurable dashboards

• Reduction of “noise” while exposing hazards

• Proactive surfacing of hot spots and potential risks in context

• Custom analysis and reports with no scripting

• Multi-dimensional correlation across objects

• Fine-grained time series views

When it comes to performance, CloudPhysics always-on analytics provide granular data that yields deep, actionable insights needed to address key performance and storage optimiza-tion concerns. Unprecedented visibility across the compute and data storage environments—from CPU and memory to I/O trends and datastore fill trends—

enables troubleshooting, prompt diagnosis, and remediation. Intel’s products, which form back bone of the modern data center, go through relent-less improvement cycles. For example, Moore’s Law brings exponential improvements to what next generation Intel® Xeon® processors offer and NVMe based SSDs are revolutionizing stor-age systems. Looking forward, Intel® Optane® SSDs, based on the new 3D XPoint technology, can drive yet untold advancements into data centers.

Actionable data on where to guide your finite annual upgrade budget will help prioritize your spend and enable you to measure improvement afterwards. And while these new advancements can dramatically improve performance of your data center wherever they are used, new optimization opportunities will emerge once the upgrades are in your data center with your workloads. Can you quantify how well your data center can be optimized? Not being able to do so is often crippling, result-ing in delays in upgrades and data cen-ter modernization projects even when such improvements would dramatically lower net costs. With a data-driven approach you can invest with confi-dence and justify your ROI.

Performance Analytics

Virtualization workloads are constantly moving and changing, which makes performance issues difficult to track and pin down. More than 90% of performance problems are related to storage, so troubleshooting takes a huge amount of manual, tedious work to sift through data and get to answers you need. Across all of your datastores and VMs, how do admins find out which ones are experiencing contention and which are not—unless you’re using CloudPhysics? Even more importantly, which VMs are the culprits and which are victims? Today, admins must:

• Pull storage config data from vSphere for each host, VM, and component involved

• Use vCenter* stats and esxtop or third-party tools to find performance spikes

• Write scripts to collect and pull performance data from vCenter for more granularity or to go further back in time than is possible using native tools

• Use storage vendor’s tools to deter-mine what’s going on at the array or target

• Put all the data together into a spreadsheet; create charts and graphs

• Get the virtualization and stor-age teams together for a war room exercise

• Determine possible solutions and how to test them out

In CloudPhysics I/O Contention cards, we have simplified all this by auto-matically classifying the datastores into those that require your atten-tion and those that are noteworthy. CloudPhysics immediately turns your raw metadata into actionable informa-tion—without scripting, spreadsheets or needing an army of experts to

CloudPhysics Global Dataset

With thousands of deployments across the globe, CloudPhysics is collecting billions of pieces of machine metadata every day and has amassed a data set of over 100 trillion objects, form-ing a “collective intelligence.” Access to this machine metadata is securely managed and used to evaluate the efficacy of our algo-rithms, to develop new ones and to help IT organizations bench-mark against industry peers.

5 Minutes to Activate

15 Minutes to Insights

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decipher findings. Data-driven insights provide unprecedented visibility into your disk I/O workloads and automate culprit and victim analysis, helping quickly identify performance problems and accelerate troubleshooting.

An interactive timeline visually cor-relates patterns among datastores and VMs, dramatically simplifying the exploration of hotspots.

Root Cause Analytics

In CloudPhysics Exploration Mode, time series data is uniquely handled by the platform to enable a user to analyze

multiple dimensions of the infrastruc-ture around the same time axis. New forms of “mash-ups” set in the contexts created by CloudPhysics, its part-ners, and users, dramatically improve the insights needed for operational effectiveness.

• Analyze changes over time inter-actively through exploration mode; zoom in/out to evaluate correlations and causation

• Troubleshoot application disrup-tions in context of VM performance, resource consumption, change/event log, configuration history, known issues associated with operational hazards and best practices

Storage Analytics

CloudPhysics automatically under-stands and anticipates when you will run out of space, helping you to proactively discover storage capacity needs and prevent downtime, without overprovisioning. CloudPhysics also identifies day-to-day storage space waste in the data center, showing potential space savings opportunities (both in TB and dollars).

• Find opportunities for greater effi-ciency, eliminating wasted disk space and money by instantly pinpointing snapshot bloat (Snapshots Gone Wild)

CloudPhysics configurable dashboards expose trends and hazards in a virtualized environment. By identify-ing issues using analytical methods rather than mere symptoms, CloudPhysics increases the “signal” and reduces the “noise” in IT operations management.

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• Proactively manage space issues and avoid datastore-induced disruptions by visualizing all datastores across multiple vCenter instances (Datastore Space)

• Proactively manage space usage inside VMs by automatically tracking the probability of guest disk parti-tions running out of space in the next week, month, or six months (Guest Space Saver)

• Optimize VM density for greater efficiency by identifying VMs whose virtual disks offer potential space savings (VM Space Saver)

• Reduce VM sprawl for good by discovering unused virtual machines and the disk space they are consum-ing (Unused VMs)

The data center storage marketplace is undergoing a revolution, and requires a deeper look. The exponential growth in mobile, “Bring Your Own Device” and the proliferation of cameras, videos, IoT, and structured and unstructured data are pushing an enormous wave of bits that need to be stored by IT. Yet budgets are often flat and expecta-tions are rising. From a technological perspective, software defined storage, scale-out storage, virtualization, flash SSDs and new SSD technologies are all creatively disrupting what once was a mature market for proprietary storage arrays. How and where data was stored five years ago will be almost unrecog-nizable five years into the future.

The analytics approach can reduce the barrier of adopting new storage technologies by providing data-driven answers to traditional planning ques-tions. For example, the increasing pro-liferation of flash is forcing IT organiza-tions to make decisions about where to deploy flash in the data center and how much for given workloads. These ques-tions just get harder as storage evolves. The NVMe SSD device interface has raised the theoretical data transfer limit between from 600MB/s with SATA to 4,000MB/s with PCIe® 3.0 x4 available

today from the Intel® Solid State Drive Data Center family for PCIe (NVMe). Looking forward, Intel® Optane® SSD, based on 3D XPoint technology, will continue this trend. As these upgrade cycles continue, you can use analytics to find workloads that can truly benefit from the higher performance and for which the return of investment will be immediate, thus providing immediate on ramps. Analytical answers to these trade-offs make it much easier to justify investment in upgrades and modern-ization projects. Ultimately, freeing up IT teams from troubleshooting allows them to spend time creating new prod-ucts and services to offer to customers. Data-driven insights transform IT from a “thing we have to pay for” to “our competitive advantage”.

Storage Cache Analytics

Available as part of an assessment service from CloudPhysics, this feature lets you benefit from our modeling capabilities to prioritize VM disks with the best opportunities to benefit from caching. You also identify the specific cache sizes needed to achieve desired latency reductions.

CloudPhysics Platform Highlights

SaaS-Based

• No hardware required

• No software required

• No operational overhead

• Weekly free updates, bugfixes and feature improvements

• Secure access from anywhere and from any device

• Five minutes to activate. Since there is no software to install, activating involves the automated setup of a small virtual appliance. From the time of download to completion is typi-cally five minutes.

• Fifteen minutes to insights. Once activated, metric data collection is automatically initiated immediately. In line with the continuous upload of the scrubbed, encrypted and compressed data, metrics are auto-matically analyzed. Within the first fifteen minutes, the SaaS front-end is automatically populated with analyti-cal insights to your data center.

Performance & Scalability• A single vApp per vCenter; all analy-

sis performed on the CloudPhysics platform

• Scales to tens of thousands of physi-cal servers and VMs across data cen-ters—with no impact on the vCenter

Extensibility & Integration• The CloudPhysics data platform is

data agnostic; it is easy to extend the platform to other external data sources

• CloudPhysics can customize and fine-tune algorithms to your specific need

• You can customize the user interface to your needs or create new cards for your specific use case

Conclusion

CloudPhysics provides data-driven insights for smarter IT, focusing the power and productivity of Big Data analytics on delivering deep insights to key data center challenges. CloudPhysics significantly reduces risk, saves costs, drives performance and enables smarter business deci-sions for IT organizations. It provides rich data for where to direct your annual upgrade budget for maximum impact, and then, once that is in place, it provides more data to ensure those upgrades have been optimized for your workloads in your data center. IT teams using CloudPhysics are empowered to make data-driven decisions to not only increase efficiency and lower cost but also balance these goals with

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“CloudPhysics’ ease of deploy-ment provides a tremendous cost and time advantage; be-cause it’s SaaS, we were able to achieve visibility into our data centers in just minutes, not the months it takes to deploy on-premise tools.”

Joachim Heppner, Head of Virtualization Engineering Services, Sanofi

DisclaimersIntel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Performance varies depending on system

configuration. No computer system can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at intel.com/storage.Copyright © 2016 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Optane™ and Xeon® are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright © 2016 CloudPhysics. All rights reserved.* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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Intel’s Data Center Group and Storage Group provide physical products, software code, system expertise and industry know-how to a wide variety of customers, software vendors, and con-sultants in the Cloud, Enterprise IT, and Telecommunications markets. Many data centers today use Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® Solid State Drive Data Center Family of SSDs, Intel® Converged Ethernet Adaptors, plus software libraries and code that was optimized in consultation with Intel. Best in class data centers of tomorrow will likely use Intel® Optane® SSDs as well, which are based on 3D XPoint™ technology.

Intel is committed to helping IT address big data center challenges of today and tomorrow. By providing advanced products and improving the current art of using them to “get the job done”, Intel has helped address challenges like power consumption, processing capa-bility, networking, storage, throughput, floorspace, etc. Together with com-panies like CloudPhysics, Intel wants to have continued conversations with Enterprise IT and cloud providers about the data center challenges of today and tomorrow.

minimizing the risk of performance problems and application disruptions. The dynamic nature of virtualization is no longer a hurdle in making your data center a competitive advantage.

About CloudPhysicsCloudPhysics provides data-driven insights for smarter IT, with operational analytics that give IT teams more power than ever before to understand, trou-bleshoot, and optimize their virtualized data centers, reducing risk and waste. The company, based in Santa Clara, CA, serves thousands of users worldwide across a variety of industries.

To learn more, contact sales@cloudphysics.com

To learn more, visit www.intel.com/storage

About Intel

Intel is the world’s largest semiconduc-tor manufacturer and makes a wide range of products that are used across the high tech and electronics industry.