Virtual Instruments Announces SOS-4-SANs Emergency Troubleshooting Service

SCOTTS VALLEY, CA--(Marketwire - December 15, 2009) - Virtual Instruments, a leader in storage area network (SAN) and virtual infrastructure optimization solutions, today announced the SOS-4-SANs service for Global 2000 IT organizations experiencing Fibre Channel SAN availability or performance emergencies. The service is designed to offer immediate expert assistance to end-users, integrators, and SAN component vendors who require deep, vendor-neutral expertise in troubleshooting SAN problems. By utilizing the NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom monitoring and analysis solutions, Virtual Instruments is unique in its ability to identify and resolve Fibre Channel SAN emergencies to bring mission-critical applications rapidly back to optimal performance.

High profile SAN failures are increasingly common with a number of major outages happening recently at government agencies, airlines, e-commerce sites, and communications service providers. Beyond these highly public examples, there are dozens of undisclosed global 2000 IT departments having serious performance or availability problems related to their mission-critical SANs. Failures are occurring at a time when IT staffing resources have remained flat or even decreased, which compounds the problem. Most affected companies have unsuccessfully engaged with their storage and switch component vendors to help solve these problems. Unfortunately, storage and switch vendors often struggle with the same SAN issues, in part because they lack the granular instrumentation necessary to troubleshoot the root cause across the entire SAN infrastructure, resulting in weeks or months to resolve problems.

"SANs continue to grow in size and complexity due to typical data increases of 30 to 50 percent per year, which inherently increases the risk of failed components, mis-configurations, compatibility issues, and transmission errors that create serious performance problems and even outages," said Mark Urdahl, CEO of Virtual Instruments. "Virtual Instruments is increasingly engaged by global companies in SAN crises, and has decided to formalize a service offering around our expertise and capabilities in emergency troubleshooting and performance optimization to help protect companies from the significant financial impact SAN outages can have on a business."

Designed for large enterprises running mission-critical applications who are struggling with SAN performance or availability issues, the new SOS-4-SANs service relies on the award-winning Virtual Instruments NetWisdom SAN optimization and VirtualWisdom virtual infrastructure optimization products. Included in the service, Virtual Instruments Professional Services personnel will remotely assess the situation and, if necessary, come to the customer's site and install SAN instrumentation software and hardware for data collection and analysis. The services personnel will work with the customer to identify and resolve the critical problems. The service works with all Fibre Channel SAN devices including those from leading Fibre Channel vendors EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, HP, 3PAR, Dell, Sun, Brocade, Cisco, Qlogic, and Emulex.

"As data continues to explode and be the heartbeat of all large corporations, SAN downtime is increasingly costing organizations millions of dollars each year, especially for transaction-oriented businesses such as financial, retail, service providers, healthcare, manufacturing, and many government agencies," stated analyst Steve O'Donnell, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Virtual Instruments has deep expertise in identifying SAN performance and availability issues and this new SOS-4-SAN service could be immensely beneficial to larger organizations running mission-critical applications on Fibre Channel SANs."

Fiber Channel SANs were originally invented to speed I/O for engineering workstations. They were never architected to meet the demands of today's large enterprise data centers, where tens of thousands of servers are often connected to tens of Petabytes of business-critical data, and due to the channel nature of the architecture and the limited perspective on scalability, Fiber Channel SANs were never designed to be monitored for reliability and performance. This combination of increased complexity due to scale, coupled with inherent lack of monitoring within the protocol, has led to a significantly higher probability of a major SAN outage. Virtual Instruments, a pioneer in SAN monitoring, has developed the only viable SAN monitoring solution as it collects real-time SAN operational data. This data allow Virtual Instruments to identify performance issues and behavioral problems before they become critical.

Pricing and Availability

The SOS-4-SANs service is available immediately. Once a request is received via the online form or the phone, a qualified Virtual Instruments services professional will immediately respond at no charge to the customer. At that time, the services professional will run through a checklist of the most common problems to determine the complexity of the issue and its impact on the company's business. Upon determination of the problem scope and fee agreement, VI services personnel will travel to the customer's site with the NetWisdom monitoring and analysis solution to begin problem identification and resolution. VI personnel will remain on site as needed until the issues are under control. Fees for the service will include a daily rate plus fees for expenses associated with temporarily deploying the NetWisdom solution into the on-site SAN infrastructure. Customers in need of emergency SAN services should visit www.sos4sans.com or call 877-234-4121 to immediately register problems.

About Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments offers the award-winning NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom virtual infrastructure optimization solutions that provide deep monitoring and analysis of how the virtualized IT infrastructure and SAN affect business-critical application performance. Customers such as Barclay's Card Services, Kaiser Permanente and McKesson Corp. achieve significant cost savings in virtualization and SAN deployments by optimizing utilization, performance and availability of IT resources. Leading system and storage vendors including IBM, HP and EMC leverage Virtual Instruments to design and optimize SAN solutions for enterprise customers. The company was founded in June 2008 via a spin-out from Finisar Corp.; it has headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., and can be found online at http://www.virtualinstruments.com.

Contact Information: Media Contact Melissa Lang Voce Communications on behalf of Virtual Instruments (330) 401-9220