I was recently lucky enough to have a conference call with some of the product managers at Quest Software (Vizioncore) about a number of their products and up and coming products. This first post is surrounding their new product which has been announced at VMworld this week, vFoglight Storage. Brad Adamske (Product Manager) and Steve Paravola (Product Marketing Manager) took a few minutes of their busy days to explain the product to me.

vFoglight Storage is based on software produced by a company called Monosphere who Quest purchased in December 2008, the product was then known as Storage Horizon.

vFoglight Storage provides a top down and bottom up view of your storage in your virtual environment. It not only displays and allows you to track capacity and performance statistics but also allows you to track the topology in real-time.

At release the product will work with all of the NetApp filers, EMC Clarion CX3’s and CX4’s, in the future HP EVA and Dell storage amongst others will be added to the product range.

Not only will it talk to the arrays but also the storage switches to monitor IO, throughput and latency, Cisco and Brocade are supported at the moment.

The product is completely agentless, working with all the different manufacturers API’s.

With vFoglight Storage you are able to track back to see how your performance differs from any time in past, very useful for being able to compare baseline figures when you believe you have a performance issue, or to see how the latest roll out of virtual machines has effected your storage.

Features and Benefits from Product Data Sheet

Performance Monitoring – Detailed metrics help you quickly identify performance problems that impact the virtual environment.

Capacity Monitoring – Detailed capacity monitoring helps you identify capacity issues, including how much storage each datastore is using.

Topology Views – On-the-fly graphical views show relationships between virtual and physical storage infrastructure, helping you determine if your storage setup best meets your organization’s needs.

Out-of-the Box Alerts – Detailed alarms highlight deviations from industry best practices, allowing you to identify and resolve problems faster.
Reporting – Out-of-the-box reports on performance, capacity and alarms make it easy to communicate storage performance and capacity information to key stakeholders.

Initially vFoglight storage will not plug-in with the conventional vFoglight product but this integration is in the roadmap for future releases.

I really can’t wait to have a look at the technology and I’m looking forward to the Dell storage integration as large amount of our customers run Equallogic SAN’s.

If you are lucky enough to be at VMworld this week stop by booth #1113 to see a live demo for yourself.