This weeks vendorwag is with Virtual Instruments and their guy, Archie Hendryx.  Virtual Instrument’s “Virtual Instruments ensures the performance and availability of mission-critical applications by providing a comprehensive infrastructure optimization platform“, specifically they focus on the fibre-channel SAN fabric. Archie works as the Senior Solutions Architect for Virtual Instruments…

As ever we kick off with a quick overview of Virtual Instruments, and then we head off into the QA session. Here’s my lists of questions for Archie…

Q. It’s often been said that performance bottleneck in FC SAN will normally be found in the array or configuration – so why spend time and money looking at the fabric – which is largely unsaturated?

Q. In our chat you mentioned some common problems like HBA interment devices, Resets, Optic Degradation – Can you explain a little about typical problems customers have with their fabrics?

Q. So would you say its far the VI is about identifying problems in the fabric, that result in poor performance – rather than spotting genuine over utilisation of the pipe? Is it about storage guys being able to say “It’s not my fault, therefore not my problem?” Does this make VI more a troubleshooting tool, than a performance monitoring/management tool?

Q. I see you have a “recording” feature that makes me think of Xengati’s playback feature for Ethernet traffic – why is this so important?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link.

The vendorwag and chinwag are both available on my YouTube Channel as well..

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

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