Have you ever wondered how your VMware data center performs in comparison with others? Have you ever wished to have a reliable data set at disposal to justify investments in your IT infrastructure?
I am sure you have. But unfortunately, the required data is only in rare cases quick and well-prepared available.
CloudPhysics vision of Big Data for IT operations may be the answer to questions similar to those above.
During Tech Field Day 11 in Boston, they demonstrated the potential of their solution based on some use cases.
I do not want to repeat them all within this blog post as you can watch the records of Tech Field Day whenever you want on Vimeo (you can find the links to the videos below).
But I want to summarize in this blog post, why I was so impressed by the possibilities this incredible volume of data can offer and enable for everyone.
So let’s start with some basics. First, where is all the data coming from?
The data is collected by a small VM that is deployed by CloudPhysics customers in their virtual environments. And the number of devices delivering metadata for the data pool is already amazing:
- 700.000 connected VMs
- 100.000 connected datastores worldwide
- 37.000 connected Servers
- 12.000 Global Users
The collected metadata is transferred to CloudPhysics data center where it is automatically correlated and analyzed. The results are provided to the customers for troubleshooting, monitoring and optimizing their environments.
And now the magic begins:
CloudPhysics enables you to create and query your own reports beside a large set of predefined ones. If you want, you can publish your self-created queries to a public dashboard . So other customers can use your reports and of course they can rate and edit them, too.
Imagine the endless possibilities! One example was mentioned in CloudPhysics #TFD11 presentation: identifying the danger of newly discovered bugs for your environment. Or you can compare different software versions against each other in relation to latency, CPU time or whatever comes to your mind. The virtualization community is a really powerful one. So chances are good that the number of high-quality queries provided by other users will increase over time. And most customers have the same or similar requirements and needs.
Another interesting approach is the recently announced Partner Edition. This solution enables channel and vendor partners to increase technical support for their customers and introduces new opportunities using CloudPhysics data lake.
To achieve this goal as best as possible, the partners can fall back on pre-defined queries and assessments. Or they design them by their own to provide answers to certain basic questions like public cloud migration assessments, Health checks, competitive analysis and much more.
Currently, CloudPhysics only supports VMware environments. I understand, that particularly in the early stage of a new solution it is necessary to focus on a product with a high market share to quickly achieve results. But in my opinion, the time has come to extend the support to more hypervisors (eg. KVM, Hyper-V,..) to increase the data set respectively the data depth.
That would allow other really interesting statistic analyses eg. the comparison of different vendors. I am not sure if everybody would welcome such possibilities, but it would be great from a customer perspective.
Curious?
Here you can find the presentation of CloudPhysics for Tech Field Day 11 in Boston (June 23, 2016):
Presenters:
- John Blumenthal
- Chris Schin