As I write this blog, it is the day after Cinco de Mayo, and I spent many hours in front of a blender, thinking about Jimmy Buffet and how I can change my latitude, when Steve Duplessie came to my mind. I am sure he will be as disturbed as I was at that revelation. However, the point of this somewhat foggy flashback is the term he coined, “The I/O Blender,” referring to what happens when you take a bunch of virtual machines (VMs) with varying levels of I/O demands and dump them onto a single physical server, swirl them together and hope that it all comes out smooth and delicious, versus a clumpy science project.

Avoiding this kind of mixology is exactly what Emulex’s OneCommand Vision was designed to help you avoid. Vision is a unique product with some unique origins. Unlike most products that are designed to fill a market need, this started out in life as a testing tool for our Design Verification Test (DVT) engineers. When server virtualization came along, we needed a way to see what individual performance of each VM was while testing N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). Then people asked if it could be updated to test latency between the VM and adapter, and then the VM and switches, and then VM and target, and you get the idea. As we were working with OEMs and ecosystem partners, we used the tools to help optimize performance and find issues, and before you know it, the proverbial star was born, and it became the OneCommand Vision product.

Now that we are living in the world of the virtual data center, we are mixing some interesting ingredients in the I/O Blender. The screenshot below shows a blend of I/O profiles for a bunch of VMs running on a server. You can see how some VMs are fairly consistent and smooth, and others are spiky and somewhat random. If you look at the “yellow” application, you can see how the I/O spikes of that application impact the others running on the server. In some cases, it really stomps on the other apps, affecting service level agreements (SLAs) and performance of applications.

You can also see that the “beige application” uses the most I/O and might be a good candidate for a VMmotion to a less utilized server and I/O environment. Now, you can do this evaluation in 30 seconds when you have the right lens to look through, and this is how we solve the I/O Blender challenge in the virtual data cater. This is also the difference between I/O management and traditional system resource management (SRM) tools. Below is a list of some of the top ways that OneCommand Vision’s I/O management capabilities can help mix up cool, refreshing I/O cocktails versus bad-tasting potions of user frustration.

1. Improve Cost Savings: IT organizations currently use various management and optimization tools. While device and system resource management tools are ideal for ensuring proper operation within their specific domains, they do not provide insight into the health and performance of the I/O traffic that travels between the domains.

With the Emulex OneCommand Vision application, IT administrators now can leverage the industry’s only non-intrusive I/O management solution tool to proactively monitor and efficiently diagnose I/O health and performance from the application layer down to the physical disk. With Emulex OneCommand Vision, IT administrators can control costs by the monitoring I/O connections throughout the network, enabling:

• Reduction in capital costs through proactive management of the I/O infrastructure
• Reduction in operating expenses and impact to revenue through the reduction of both scheduled and unscheduled downtime

2. Improve Asset Utilization and Reduce Capital Expenditures: Budget constraints impact IT organizations, large and small; therefore, IT administrators need ways to make their budgets go further. One of the most effective ways of achieving this is by improving utilization of I/O assets. OneCommand Vision is designed to analyze I/O traffic data and identify I/O assets that are being over-subscribed or underutilized (under-subscribed), providing the information IT administrators need to reconfigure hardware assets to create a more “balanced” workload environment and optimize utilization of existing assets within the data center.

3. Increase Application Performance: Assessing application performance is fairly straightforward: the application is either operating at speed or it is not! However, diagnosing application performance can be quite difficult. The various tiers of infrastructure that manage the I/O introduce additional layers of complexity, making diagnosis of I/O issues rather complicated. Currently, IT administrators do not have any tools that can monitor and trend I/O performance over time. With such data, IT administrators can compare present I/O performance data to historical data to determine whether I/O performance has changed. With OneCommand Vision, IT administrators can gather and analyze I/O trend data, which can then be used to diagnose I/O performance degradation within the I/O path, averting potential conditions that can negatively impact day-to-day business activities.

4. Deliver on SLA Commitments: SLAs are an important consideration for businesses, as they help determine the type and level of service the businesses will provide to their customers. Therefore, meeting SLA commitments is critical for an IT organization. There is a broad range of monitoring and management tools for storage, system and application resources, but not for I/O resources. The state of the I/O and I/O paths can have a significant impact on SLA commitments. With OneCommand Vision, IT administrators can achieve their SLA commitments by optimizing the performance of I/O paths and ensuring these resources deliver the level of performance outlined in the SLA.

5. Deliver Scalable, Heterogeneous Support: Scalable solutions not only help organizations to reduce management and capital costs, but they also increase responsiveness to changing business needs. OneCommand Vision’s pure software architecture provides the highest level of scalability, enabling:

• Quick deployment
• Streamlined management
• Rapid re-configuration
• Heterogeneous support (application, volume managers, OS, adapter, server, switches, storage arrays)

With OneCommand Vision, IT administrators can keep pace with the growth of their data centers, enabling them to identify and rectify I/O bottlenecks before application availability and business performance is impacted.

6. Reduce I/O Bottlenecks: Diagnosing I/O bottlenecks can be a challenge. Current tools are costly, not very scalable and can be used after the I/O bottlenecks have occurred. But what if there was a way to proactively address I/O bottlenecks? OneCommand Vision was designed to do just that. It not only helps to address I/O bottlenecks when they happen, but it can be used to proactively avert them. With OneCommand Vision, IT administrators can proactively identify and quickly address bottlenecks, helping to maximize application availability and business efficiency.

7. Increase Management Efficiency: Data centers are becoming more and more complex, and the issues they present are also becoming equally complex. This can cause friction between the various IT groups, leading to “finger-pointing sessions” and “who-done-it” episodes. Typically, such conditions occur because the tool needed to identify and isolate the issues is not available. With Emulex’s OneCommand Vision I/O management application, IT administrators can quickly identify whether performance issues originated in the storage network. OneCommand Vision also can help identify potential I/O-related issues before they happen. With OneCommand Vision, IT administrators can improve management efficiency and time to resolution for I/O-related performance issues, enabling:

• Proactive system performance management, making adjustments before there is a performance problem
• Cooperative problem management, where root cause is quickly established and the problem is resolved for good

If you want to learn more, check out the videos at http://www.emulex.com/products/management-software/io-management/onecommand-vision/overview.html.

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