In his January 18 Information Week storage blog, Biggest Storage Trend of 2012, George Crump predicts that storage performance management will likely be the biggest concern of IT in 2012. Performance management includes directing applications to the right storage infrastructure, monitoring storage performance in real time, and making quick adjustments when necessary to ensure your mission critical business processes run smoothly and quickly.

The increasing importance of performance management comes not only from the proliferation of speed- and latency-sensitive business processes and database applications, but from the fast rise of SSD that can actually provide that performance at a reasonable price. Crump points to the need for tools that provide quick, valuable, real-time insight to ensure that performance requirements are met consistently with the best bang for the buck.

The recognition of that need is behind the streamlined and information-rich architecture and interface of Kaminario’s management and performance analysis software for the K2 product line.

If you want to get a quick feel for our performance instrumentation, check out this short video that demonstrates just how useful and intuitive it is. The video shows how real-time throughput, latency, IOPs, and read and write information are displayed on a single pane of glass using highly intuitive graphs and dashboards. A quick glance provides the big picture real-time view, yet you can also drill down to the details without having to go through several layers of menus and screens. With a few clicks of a mouse you can access average performance measures over the past minute, hour, day, week, month, or six months for all or each of the performance factors. You can also get information on the average volumes of reads and writes over time or in real time, all valuable information for managing, tuning, placing, and optimizing your storage and application performance. It’s all highly visual and intuitive and Kaminario has gone to great lengths to streamline it into a GUI that is among the most useful in the industry.

In a future post, I’ll demonstrate how I use the performance instrumentation to profile and understand the storage performance of an Oracle or SQL Server database application

Tags: George Crump, Information Week, IOPS, Kaminario, latency, mission critical, Oracle, performance analysis, performance management, read, SQL Server, SSD, Storage Performance, throughput, write