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High-availability clustering provider SIOS Technology, formerly known in the U.S. as Steeleye, has unveiled new machine-learning analytics software that enables IT managers to optimize the performance of virtualized systems.
SIOS describes its iQ standard edition as a simple-to-use, intelligent software package for understanding IT operations and resolving issues in VMware, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services systems. It is designed to improve performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity utilization in both Linux and Windows high-availability environments.
SIOS iQ, launched July 14 and designed to be a primary resource for IT operations information-and-issue resolution, applies advanced machine-learning analytics to a range of data sets, including application and infrastructure data from third-party tools and frameworks, to recognize abnormal patterns of behavior and identify root causes of performance issues, Chief Operating Officer Jerry Melnick told eWEEK.
“We felt we need to add some intelligence to the equation … we brought in both academic and commercial expertise in machine learning, and we set about to build a very new product and expand our market,” Melnick said. “It’s designed for line-of-business people. The ease-of-use designed into our SIOS PERC [performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity] Dashboard is unique in the industry.”
Conventional approaches record and report discrete events—such as CPU utilization exceeding a threshold—to identify a problem in a VMware environment. Often complex or subtle issues can go unnoticed, and IT staff are inundated with alerts without guidance for prioritizing, interpreting or correcting them. SIOS iQ identifies problems and recommends the best solutions, filtering out the noise and alert storms typical in traditional approaches, Melnick said.
Key features of the standard edition include:
—Performance Root Cause Analysis learns the relationships of objects and their normal patterns of behavior in a VMware infrastructure (hosts, VMs, application, network, storage, etc.); proactively identifies anomalies in behavior and the root causes of performance problems in any application; and recommends specific changes to resolve those problems.
—SIOS PERC Dashboard enables IT managers to ensure that their VMware environment is optimized along four key quality-of-service dimensions: performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity (PERC). The dashboard is designed to provide mobile application ease of use. The standard edition of SIOS iQ includes a variety of user enhancements, including the ability to expand charts to drill deeply into specific PERC areas, color-coded status indicators showing the criticality of issues—critical, warning and informational, and the inclusion of performance impact analysis showing all applications, VMs, hosts and data stores associated with a detected performance problem.
—Specialized Analytics for SQL Server provides advanced insight into performance issues associated with SQL Server deployments in VMware. SIOS iQ standard edition correlates interactions between SQL and infrastructure resources in the VMware environment to identify the deep root cause of performance issues.
—Enhanced Host-Based Caching helps IT staff easily determine how to improve storage performance for applications by using server-side storage and host-based caching (HBC). It analyzes the environment, including all blocks written to disk, and identifies the read ratio and the load profile to identify the VMs (and their disks) that will benefit most from HBC. SIOS iQ makes specific configuration recommendations, such as how much cache to add and what cache block size to configure. It also predicts the added performance that will be achieved if recommendations are implemented and shows the results in a single, easy-to-read chart.
—SIOS iQ Resource Optimization: SIOS iQ provides an enhanced user interface for optimizing VMware resources by identifying and eliminating idle VMs and snapshot sprawl. SIOS iQ identifies under-used virtual machines and unnecessary snapshots and predicts the potential monthly savings that can be realized by eliminating them.
SIOS iQ is available now. List price for the standard edition of SIOS iQ is $150/month/host (paid annually). This is a host-license-based product that is sold as a renewable subscription.
During the subscription period, SIOS iQ subscribers are entitled to 12 hours/day, 5 days/week support and to receive new features and updates that will be delivered through the built-in automatic product update feature. A free edition of SIOS iQ is also available, Melnick said.