Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe

Gold winner in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2016 Products of the Year Storage and SAN Management Tools category.

Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe is as named -- a real-time, full-line rate performance and availability monitoring product for NAS infrastructure. That real-time feature is what Virtual Instruments claimed as its primary differentiator.

While Probe products have historically focused on Fibre Channel SAN monitoring, NAS systems also face performance issues. Those include things like rogue clients, noisy neighbors and bottlenecks in accessing metadata.

While real-time monitoring has been a staple of Fibre Channel systems, VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe brings that same feature to NFS traffic. Users can check on hundreds of different metrics the Probe provides for NAS monitors.

Virtual Instruments claimed NAS Performance Probe is vendor-independent and functions across domains. It comes in the form of a 2U piece of network hardware or as a virtual appliance. The Probe supported NFS 3 out of the gate, with support for NFS 4, SMB and iSCSI scheduled for 2017.

One judge described VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe as "a high-end solution that can provide advanced analytics for IP-based NAS storage environments." That judge also noted that it is so comprehensive in its analytics that it's "likely overkill for many," adding that for organizations with "mission-critical deployments on NAS, this will help enable better results."

Previously, to get the kind of data Probe provides, a user would need to capture packet data and send it back to the NAS array vendor for analysis. Changing that to real-time information is just one of the reasons why VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe took gold this year.

(The core technology for VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe came to Virtual Instruments through its acquisition of Load DynamiX, which earned a gold medal in the 2013 Products of the Year, last March.)