Virtana's VirtualWisdom infrastructure management software is available now for Infinidat's InfiniBox.
According to the companies, the release offers InfiniBox customers infrastructure management tools equal to Virtana's other partner storage vendors, which includes Cisco, PureStorage and NetApp.
The VirtualWisdom software lets organizations monitor and log storage infrastructure performance by AI, remap applications to the hardware infrastructure and manage storage resources based on organization needs and service levels.
VirtualWisdom collects 200 unique properties and metrics in a storage environment, configured to a given storage vendor's hardware, and provides administrators an overview of their storage environment and potential bottlenecks through a console. The software can automate storage management across the infrastructure stack, said Jonathan Cyr, vice president of product management at Virtana.
The AIOps monitoring market that Virtana competes in includes similar third-party infrastructure monitoring software from LogicMonitor and Splunk Enterprise. Similar offerings from hardware vendors include HPE InfoSight and Pure Storage Pure1.
The VirtualWisdom integration is now available for Infinidat customers through subscription and licensed with a virtual or physical hardware appliance. Infinidat's InfiniBox storage arrays are available as either a one-time purchase or an ongoing Opex subscription through partner vendors.
Virtana also sells additional software subscriptions, including Virtana Migrate and Virtana Optimize, which can move and manage workloads between cloud providers and on-prem storage. Infinidat's InfiniBoxstorage array system is sold as subscription or a one-time purchase.
The hardware uses caching management software across DRAM and NAND caching layers to manage spinning-disk storage with speeds akin to flash memory, according to the company, for organizations' critical data and workloads. The company focuses on organizations that store petabytes of data.
Despite the performance promises, Infinidat did release an all-flash array this year. The company also signaled its intention to expand with NVMe-based PCIe SSD components within InfiniBox systems in the future.
How Virtana, Infinidat got here
Virtana has become a power player in infrastructure management primarily through absorbing other vendors and services within their market, said Dave Raffo, an analyst at Evaluator Group. The company's VirtualWisdom management software can oversee data demands and bottlenecks, which would normally require excessive manpower to monitor, Raffo added.
To do all of this from end to end is difficult for anyone to do themselves.
Dave RaffoAnalyst, Evaluator Group
"For [Virtana] to add a new storage system means they're getting requests," Raffo said. "To do all of this from end to end is difficult for anyone to do themselves."
InfiniBox comes from the corporate lineage of Moshe Yanai, Raffo said. Yanai led development of EMC Symmetrix enterprise arrays through the 1990s, which became part of Dell, and later Diligent Technologies and XIV, both of which were purchased by IBM. InfiniBox formally launched in 2015 after a soft launch in 2013.
"It's a very-well respected technology," Raffo said. "Just not everybody needs such a complex and expensive system like a Fibre Channel SAN. I guess that's one reason they might want to use Virtana."
