When organisations migrate to a new virtualised environment or private cloud and start moving business-critical applications, the problems are often storage and SAN I/O related. The traditional way of dealing with this has been over-provisioning of storage and storage networking capacity which tends to be an expensive and unreliable method.
Chris James, EMEA Marketing Director at Virtual Instruments explains: “Savvy IT managers are using intelligent performance monitoring and optimisation solutions such as Virtual Instrument’s VirtualWisdom. This provides clear visibility across the whole I/O infrastructure enabling IT managers to benchmark their applications and infrastructure and comprehensively monitor performance before, during and after migration to identify any issues before they become a significant problem. The information collected can also be used to set and measure infrastructure performance and availability SLAs. We wanted to see what proportion of IT managers are taking data and application migration seriously in practice and how many know how to and do benchmark.”
The survey respondents were asked: When preparing for a data or application migration project can you confidently benchmark application performance before and after the migration to ensure performance is maintained or improved? The main finding suggests that the UK is slightly ahead with 36% of respondents actively benchmarking their data migration with Germany following suit with 34%. The survey also revealed that:
In the UK a further 40% of IT managers know how to benchmark but do not have the time, whereas only 28% in Germany know how to but do not have the time.
Furthermore 25% of the IT managers interviewed don’t benchmark because they don’t have the skills or knowledge to and an additional 6% are not benchmarking unless customers complain of a problem.
In the UK, the financial services sector (48%) and the retail/distribution/transport (52%) sectors are leading the way in benchmarking data and application migration. In Germany the corresponding results are 64% and 36%. This suggests that those sectors with a high volume of consumer data, are leading the way in migrating their data securely and think benchmarking is an important exercise.
Chris James added, “The survey results reflect our experiences with both end users and the channel that IT managers would like to ensure that their data and application migration is benchmarked to ensure performance but often they do not have the time and, in some cases, the skills to perform such tasks. Those that can and do benchmark, use the information to help them set SLAs and ensure the changes are positively impacting their IT environment. We anticipate further uptake of real-time monitoring and optimisation solutions such as VirtualWisdom as more companies migrate greater volumes of data to virtualised and private cloud environments.”