SIOS Technology Corp., a provider of software products for optimizing and protecting business-critical application environments, is rolling out a new release of SIOS iQ, its machine learning analytics software for VM environments.
Providing a key new capability, SIOS has worked with SQL Sentry to integrate iQ version 3.7 with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to bridge what it describes as a critical gap between IT infrastructure administrators and SQL Server administrators.
SIOS Technology Corp., a provider of software products for optimizing and protecting business-critical application environments, is rolling out a new release of SIOS iQ, its machine learning analytics software for VM environments.
Providing a key new capibility, SIOS has worked with SQL Sentry to integrate iQ version 3.7 with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to bridge what it describes as a critical gap between IT infrastructure administrators and SQL Server administrators.
Three Key Capabilities in SIOS iQ 3.7
There are three key areas of focus in the new release – SIOS iQ and SQL Sentry event correlation, new performance forecasting, and new environmental topology views.
SIOS iQ and SQL Sentry Event Correlation
SIOS iQ version 3.7, integrates with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to enable IT staff to identify and resolve the root causes of performance issues based on analysis of both the VMware infrastructure and the SQL Server application environment. Combining machine learning-based infrastructure analytics in SIOS iQ with the database performance analytics in SQL Sentry Performance Advisor, administrators can correlate SQL Sentry events from application to infrastructure to solve complex performance problems.
“The new capabilities reduces finger-pointing, the length of time it takes to identify a problem, and provides immediate root cause recommendations on how to solve the problem. It is an industry first,” said Jim Shocrylas, director of product management, SIOS. “It empowers DBAs to identify issues within the infrastructure so they can have a cogent conversation with the storage admin, network admin, or server admin as it pertains to quality of service.”
SQLSentry was selected as a partner because SIOS and SQL Sentry have a good corporate relationship “and they are prominent in delivering database performance monitoring capabilities in the SQL Server segment,” Shocrylas said. “They also have a strong MVP community that they have nurtured, as we have. By marrying the two products together we are providing a dream application in terms of visibility into the performance of the database, and then we are correlating that with the anomalous behavior that we are observing within the infrastructure. This allows us to combine the applications view with the infrastructure view - be it storage, network, or compute.”
There is significant momentum from the physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure, and 83% of SQL Server deployments (which has the highest penetration in the virtual infrastructure) have been moved into a virtual infrastructure, said Shocrylas.
“We are also finding that customers that have very large Oracle and SAP instances are moving toward the virtual infrastructure as well.” Oracle and SAP are on the SIOS iQ roadmap for future SIOS releases, he added.
Performance Forecasting
In other capabilities, the 3.7 release also enables users to predict and forecast performance and capacity utilization by leveraging the principles of machine learning to identify anomalies, workload impact, root cause and provide guided remediation to resolve them in the form of a seven-day forecast.
This provides IT with a view into the future to anticipate performance issues and make corrections, such as place the workload in a right-sized VM or add more compute capacity, to prevent issues proactively.
Environmental Topology Views
In addition, the new environmental topology view in the new release provides aggregated views with respect to the overall performance, enabling IT to instantly see the health of operations across their infrastructure so they can correct issues faster and achieve efficiency gains across four key service dimensions: performance, efficiency, reliability, and capacity utilization.
The new environmental topology view is segmented by environment, and color coded by issue severity to provide a representation of the critical issues within an environment that is “analogous to blinking lights within your infrastructure,” said Shocrylas, noting, “It takes away the complexity and clutter that you are provided with using classic monitoring tools.”
Up Next - SIOS iQ, version 3.8
Continuing its agile development approach, the next release of SIOS iQ, version 3.8, will be available July 29, 2016 and will include two major new capabilities: performance issue forecasting and consolidated reports.
Performance Issue Forecasting will enable users to identify anomalies, workload impact, and root cause; will provide guided remediation to resolve issues in the form of a seven-day forecast; and enable IT to anticipate and correct performance issues.
Consolidated Reports will identify VMs that have been over-allocated in terms of vRAM and/or vCPU resources; enable IT to make improvements relocate the VM to right-sized hosts or add more VMs to a shared resource pool to optimize resource allocation and reclaim wasted resources; help eliminate unneeded VMDKs that are wasting gigabytes of storage resources on data stores; and eliminate the time-consuming process of finding VMDKs.
SIOS iQ version 3.7 is available June 10, 2016. SIOS iQ version 3.8 will be available July 29, 2016.
For more information, go to www.sios.com.