Lack of Testing Putting IT Infrastructures at Risk - Seite 2

"Assuming that upgrading to flash-based storage will solve all data-related application performance issues is a myth," stated Mark Peters, Practice Director & Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Application performance is heavily impacted by the I/O characteristics and patterns employed by the application itself and its interactions with other applications that might be sharing the same, invariably virtualized, infrastructure. How each vendor has designed its all-flash arrays to handle the plethora of different workloads varies greatly. Five-fold performance differences or more are not uncommon for the same identical workload."

In spite of this, the research shows that storage performance and availability are top priorities. Seventy percent of respondents plan to establish service level agreements (SLAs) with their application owners for either performance and/or availability. For performance, specifically, 43 percent of respondents will establish performance-related SLAs. Without utilizing both load testing and monitoring, SLA adherence is practically impossible.

Ninety-four percent of respondents indicated that their organization ensures performance and availability by using monitoring tools. Fifty-four percent prefer to use vendor-independent monitoring tools. This type of solution analyzes performance across the entire infrastructure, making it much easier to spot performance issues and to understand what may be causing them. A slow-down in the storage solution could be triggered by an overloaded application elsewhere in the infrastructure, for example. 

With the performance of both applications and storage so closely linked, it should come as no surprise that the majority (74 percent) of respondents surveyed said their organization's application owners care about storage deployment decisions. Yet, only 16 percent said their application owners are involved in the storage solution deployment process. This is a missed opportunity: collaboration between storage and application teams brings a much better understanding of the overall infrastructure, and each component's effect on its performance.

"This research not only shows CIOs how the gaps in their knowledge may be putting their businesses at risk, but also illuminates the opportunity to increase visibility into their infrastructures," said Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer at Virtual Instruments. "This new level of understanding enables higher and more consistent IT infrastructure performance, and allows IT executives to reduce over-provisioning and stop wasting valuable capital, ultimately benefiting the organization's bottom line."

"Vendors can also benefit from this research," he added. "The results offer direction as to where they should be focusing their efforts. Vendors that make performance a priority and leverage both load testing and monitoring will set the bar for the rest of the industry."

ESG and Virtual Instruments will be offering a webinar on September 12^th, 2017, entitled Storage Performance - Building the Right Foundation for Meeting SLAs, that will discuss the research and new approaches to achieving performance-based SLAs. Register here.

About Virtual Instruments
Virtual Instruments is the leader in application-centric infrastructure performance 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. Virtual Instruments has over 500 customers, including enterprise IT, cloud service providers and storage vendors. The privately held company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit https://www.virtualinstruments.com.

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