CloudPhysics
Optimizing Analytics for Virtual Environments

As the business environment grows increasingly complex, staying on top of a virtual infrastructure’s configuration changes, asset compatibility issues and performance is becoming a foremost concern to most organizations. “Today’s data centers are complex and highly dynamic. They require data-driven decision making to achieve efficiency, availability, and flexibility,” explains John Blumenthal, Founder and Vice President-Strategy, CloudPhysics. The firm is the brainchild of product leadership from VMware, Symantec, Cadence, Veritas, and NetApp, that operates on the goal of empowering IT and increasing operational excellence through actionable insights.

CloudPhysics’ agile, scalable SaaS solution provides virtualization administrators and architects with detailed real-time analytics about their physical infrastructure and specific application workloads. The company has combined the Big Data science with resource management and simulation techniques for their servers to receive a stream of more than 140 billion samples of configuration, performance, failure, and event data on a daily basis. Through monitoring and analyzing Big Data, CloudPhysics builds Collective Intelligence to provide insights for customers and partners. The premium edition of the service pinpoints hidden complexities in the infrastructure and discovers inefficiencies and risks that exhaust and jeopardize resources. CloudPhysics’ solution also solves problems associated with change by telling administrators what changed and when the change took place.

The solution’s Exploration Mode is a feature that enables administrators to identify the root cause of server issues. It displays resource consumption patterns, environment changes, and allows administrators to go back in time, correlate events, issues and changes that are associated with any selected time range in the vSphere environment.This enables users to see exactly what transpired in the seconds, minutes or days leading to an application performance issue or availability problem.

Today’s data centers are complex and highly dynamic. They require data-driven decision making to achieve efficiency, availability and flexibility

The firm has identified the most commonly needed analytics and pre-packaged them as Cards. CloudPhysics offers a range of Cards for infrastructure planning, performance troubleshooting, storage space management, health checks, and more. Each of these cards present configurable, easy-to-use analytics along certain dimensions of a data center to help with optimization, exploration, and simulation. For users with unique use cases, requiring custom investigation, CloudPhysics’ Card Builder assembles a wide array of custom analytics, allowing users to create fast, customized, and filtered analytics about their unique virtual environment from numerous data fields.

CloudPhysics’ solution is trusted by users for better data center efficiency, safety, and performance of virtual systems. Joachim Heppner, Head of Virtualization Engineering Services for Sanofi, a pharmaceutical company, notes that their biggest challenge was application performance issues as well as sorting the VM waste related to storage, CPU, and memory. CloudPhysics collected, correlated, and analyzed data across Sanofi’s worldwide VMware environment to effectively provide data-driven insights for better decision making regarding infrastructure space and performance. “CloudPhysics gives us the insights we’re looking for, a lot quicker, and without the headaches—so we can make better, faster decisions for greater operational efficiency,” says Heppner.

Going forward, the company is planning to pursue its goal of harnessing the power of Big Data analytics in virtualized infrastructures by developing solutions that meet modern challenges and safeguard virtual environments.