Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO, eG Innovations

The Need for Improved Performance Tops the List

In 2013, IT Needs Increased Performance Visibility, Automatic Cross-Silo Correlation and Diagnosis, Pre-emptive Problem Alerting and Predictive Analytics

As a leading provider of automated performance management solutions for virtual, cloud and physical IT infrastructures eG Innovations is in a unique position to see how IT environments are evolving.  Having worked with hundreds of enterprise to deploy performance management solutions, eG Innovations is observing the following trends within IT and how these changes will create an even greater need for performance visibility, automated cross-silo performance correlation and diagnosis, pre-emptive problem alerting and predictive analytics.

1. Virtualization goes multi-platform with companies integrated Hyper V, VMware, Citrix, Red Hat to increase efficiency, enhance flexibility, and reduce hardware cost.  However, as virtualization platforms within the enterprise grow, IT will have to contend with new and dynamic inter-dependencies because multiple applications running on virtual machines share the same hardware. This increased complexity makes managing performance and user experience of virtualized infrastructures much more challenging, costly and time-consuming.


2. VDI adoptions broaden from pilot to full scale increasing the likelihood that support teams will be bombarded. As projects go full scale, assessing virtual desktop performance in production deployments will continue to remain a key concern as companies seek to maintain high end user satisfaction and high return on their IT investments.  Traditional management and assessment tools fail to provide rapid insight into large-scale VDI deployments because they are designed for yesterday's static, physical environments. These silo-monitoring tools are difficult to use, often can't handle the new layers of abstraction and the dynamic inter-dependencies in virtual infrastructures. In the early stages of VDI deployment, focus was on desktop virtualization viability. Pre-deployment assessments were used to determine the virtualization readiness of physical desktops. As the technology matured, the focus shifted to performance assurance, right sizing and optimization of large scale deployments. Consequently, performance assessment has had to evolve from just focusing on physical desktops to a complete analysis of the virtual desktop infrastructure.


3. Cloud computing in different forms - public, private or hybrid cloud models - will continue its fast-paced adoption rate as enterprises look to leverage it for improving the agility, scalability, redundancy and costs savings of their business operations.  Traditional performance options will no longer deliver the value companies requirement in the new cloudy world of IT.   While cloud computing offers enterprises several key benefits, it also throws up a number of new challenges when it comes to management of the performance of business services delivered from the cloud. For cloud computing to be successful, it is paramount that users of cloud-based services get the same experience as they would if these services were hosted in their corporate network. Poor user experience can threaten the success and ROI of cloud initiatives. Hence, it is essential that enterprises adopting cloud computing, plan how they can manage the performance of cloud-based business services.


4. BYOD continues to become more compelling, but widens the security risk that IT must have to contend with to maintain high availability of mission critical applications for all its users.


5. Virtualization adoption for business critical applications like SAP expands reinforcing the importance of ensuring maximum availability, performance and user satisfaction for all applications.  As more and more mission critical business applications are virtualized it will become even more important that IT administrations take a user perspective when it comes to addressing how to maintain the availability, reliability and performance of application environments.  Traditional performance management tools are silo driven, lack integration and do not pinpoint the exact layer of a challenge.  IT managers need performance management solutions that deliver complete transparency and can troubleshoot the exact location of a problem  The need to know: Is it the network, database, application, virtualization platform or storage? 

##

About the Author

Srivinas Ramanathan, CEO, eG Innovations

Prior to starting eG Innovations, Srinivas was a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. At HP, Srinivas was the chief architect of Firehunter, an ISP performance monitoring solution. He was also a key contributor to the second version of HP's WebQoS product for enabling Quality of Service for web applications. Srinivas has extensive experience in Internet technologies, performance monitoring and management, and multimedia systems, having co-authored more than forty technical papers and has been a co-inventor of fourteen U.S. patents. He has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego and a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India.