Virtual Instruments, the leader in Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, today launched the fourth-generation of its VirtualWisdom solution. The new VirtualWisdom4 platform delivers an innovative new approach and enhanced capabilities, providing customers definitive insight into how their applications and infrastructure are performing.

VirtualWisdom4 delivers the industry's first entity-centric approach enabling application-aware infrastructure performance management. Using this approach, organizations can logically group system-wide resources from physical devices to application workloads, providing everyone from IT operations to line of business leaders with the insight they need to understand how resources and applications are performing. IT teams can now customize entities to show all of the resources supporting a specific application, business unit or tier of service, allowing individuals and teams to immediately see the information relevant to them.

"We worked closely with our customers to develop the new platform to fill the gaps in the vendor ecosystem and address the broad set of use cases only Virtual Instruments can solve," said Barry Cooks, vice president of engineering at Virtual Instruments. "I'm proud of our team of engineers and data scientists and am confident that VirtualWisdom4, with its entity-centric approach, is the solution customers need to be certain in developing, deploying and proactively managing their infrastructure strategy."

Architected from the ground up, the VirtualWisdom4 platform offers an intuitive and responsive Web-based user interface, enabling customers to quickly answer the important questions and deliver the right information at the right time. Underpinned by an analytics-focused database, the new platform ingests millions of metrics per second and presents data significantly faster than before, making this the most powerful performance platform available on the market. The user interface delivers real-time visualization of thousands of metrics allowing multiple groups across IT, including application, server and storage teams, to collaboratively use the information to fine-tune application and infrastructure performance and align infrastructure spend to the actual workload.

In addition to providing enhanced capabilities for traditional fibre channel environments and top of rack fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switches, Virtual Instruments is also expanding into the network-attached storage (NAS) market with the introduction of its new probe, ProbeNTAP. The software-based storage probe leverages agentless API's to capture and present health and utilization statistics for NetApp storage arrays.

"With so many enterprises turning to cloud computing and software-defined solutions, it is critical that they have real-time insight in order to ensure that their IT infrastructure is flexible and dynamic and aligned to the needs of their mission-critical applications," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at ESG. "VirtualWisdom4 delivers a level of granular data in a truly unbiased, vendor-agnostic way that gives customers the insight they need to successfully adopt these new technologies."

Key features of VirtualWisdom4 are:

• Intelligent Topology: This new view provides insight at a glance, enabling customers to understand the connectivity and relationship between entities and gain a high-level understanding of resource utilization, health and performance.
• Case-based Alarms: Case-based alarms are designed to provide relevant and actionable information and drive a shift from reactive alarm management to proactive infrastructure management. Based on best practices observed from hundreds of customer engagements, case-based alarms enable users to view history and trending information to understand the frequency and urgency of alarms so they can take action before an issue becomes a production-impacting event.
• Live Reports: Live Reports provide intuitive and dynamic visualization of millions of wire, machine, and analytic metrics across the performance, utilization, and health of devices and entities. Live Reports can include bar charts, trend graphs, time based comparisons and histograms at an unmatched level of granularity.
• Applied Analytics: With the goal of turning data into real answers, analytics have been built into the platform based on the expertise gained from working directly with enterprise clients to optimize their infrastructure. VirtualWisdom4 delivers analytics to help customers quickly address common performance management requirements, such as workload balancing, event investigation and trend correlation across the environment.

"With VirtualWisdom4 we'll be presenting information that means something to each of the users of the interface, not just the storage team," said Simon Close, head of storage at WM Morrison Supermarkets PLC. "It'll help establish common dialogue and understanding about how the service infrastructure that supports the business is performing-by showing things in an intuitive, user friendly way that is relevant to any team that is responsible for performance and availability in their respective focal areas."

VirtualWisdom4 will be available by the end of May 2014. More information, including videos, can be found online at www.virtualinstruments.com/virtual-wisdom/.