Xangati

Great Customer Service is Knowing What is NOT the Problem

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

Euclid Insurance, located in Itasca, Illinois, knows how important customer service is when growing a business. For almost 60 years, Euclid has been providing brokerage services, employee benefits, retirement programs and property and casualty insurance coverage for companies of all sizes across the U.S. and can attribute customer service to much of their longevity and success. Dan Novak, the IT Manager for Euclid, has his own set of customers to keep happy—the 140 Euclid employees that depend on his virtual and physical network.

Dan’s infrastructure currently includes three ESX 4.1 servers hosting VMware View 4.6. He has 65 virtual desktops that he supports and after implementing the VDI solution he started to see some performance issues for various users at various times. Due to the nature of a virtualized environment, performance problems can have a ripple effect on other elements in the infrastructure that can appear and forever disappear in a matter of moments. Finding a monitoring solution that could see metrics for all of the objects across his infrastructure in real time is what led him to trial the Xangati VDI Dashboard.

“I knew that there were multiple factors that can affect a user’s performance and in order to find the root cause we needed to be able to monitor all of the possible factors,” said Dan. “The biggest benefit of Xangati was how the VDI Dashboard showed me what items were not causing an issue.”

With Xangati, Dan was able to eliminate the finger pointing between networking and storage by determining that one user’s performance problem was in fact CPU utilization. Dan used Xangati to record high-CPU events and correlate those with user performance issues. At the same time he was able to see other system metrics during the performance event which helped further confirm CPU utilization as the true source of the performance problem and its ripple effect.

By quickly eliminating which elements are not causing the performance problems across the infrastructure, Dan is able to provide superior support for his Euclid employees and keep them productive. After all, like Euclid Insurance, Dan puts a premium on customer service.

“I attempted to use other management software but lack of support prevented us from moving forward with those vendors, said Dan. “Support is one area where Xangati really shines.”

Work Smarter, Not Harder

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

Xangati wants to help you work smarter, not harder.

Managing a virtualized infrastructure is no easy task, especially when you’re dealing with a myriad of physical and virtual devices. We know that the amount of data you need to monitor for performance management in your virtualized infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. 

With infrastructure resources being continuously shared across the infrastructure, managing performance in a VDI environment, in particular, requires a vast amount of detail as to what is happening at the exact time of a performance problem in order to accurately identify the source. As Gartner analyst Terry Cosgrove points out, “Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD) is trading a configuration management challenge for a performance challenge.” Hundreds of thousands of different objects are in a constant state of flux, and every single element’s activity can potentially impact another, setting off a chain reaction that can be overwhelming to track.

At Xangati we realized early on that the changes in the data center operation required a completely new approach to identify and resolve performance problems. Our products have been designed to allow you to work smarter, not harder to locate problem sources faster and more easily than any other solution out there. Our goal has been to make it as effortless as possible for you to monitor your infrastructure to ensure performance success.

Xangati’s visual trouble ticket is one of our very best tools to do that by allowing your end users to trigger a ‘trouble ticket’ uniquely paired with a DVR recording at the time of their specific performance problem. With this visual trouble ticket, you have unparalleled insight into the virtual desktop that completely captures the precise moment when a problem took place. Our customers have found this tool invaluable in quickly isolating issues, and no one else offers a similar capability.

The visual trouble ticket provides you with a constructive “incident management process” giving objective information about an end user’s activity so that you can effectively focus your efforts to resolve the problem. Mark Vaughn of SearchServerVirtualization.com describes the visual trouble ticket as follows, “The Xangati Management Dashboard Suite takes a unique approach to record-and-replay capabilities, allowing users to record the current state of a virtual machine (VM) and immediately attach it to a help-desk ticket.”

With the visual trouble ticket, you get objective data surrounding a user’s activity that is presented from multiple vantage points – from the standpoint of the infrastructure, protocols and even from within the desktop care of the Windows Management Interface (WMI).

This data is invaluable in helping the service desk to immediately triage an issue and determine the source:

• Is it human error? Is a user, for example, impacting his own experience by trying to watch a high definition YouTube video over his remote access VPN while using his virtual desktop?
• Is it a storage latency or a network congestion issue?
• Or is there some kind of process bogging down the desktop?

Armed with the facts provided through the visual trouble ticket – as opposed to time-consuming speculation – Xangati has seen customers reduce time to problem resolution by up to 70 percent! And that translates to satisfied end users – crucial in a VDI environment, where a poor end user experience can effectively kill a VDI project.

By showing second-by-second the environment that existed when an individual was experiencing performance problems, the visual trouble ticket allows you to successfully track the escalation process – instead of trying to piece together what happened from an end user’s memory.

With the visual trouble ticket, you can more quickly focus on the cause of the performance problem, resulting in faster time to problem resolution, and enabling you to work smarter, not harder.

The Force is Strong with This One – Xangati at VMworld 2011

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

With attendance surging at 19,000 and counting, VMworld reminds me of its own  little virtualization galaxy. But it’s a galaxy that Xangati is most glad to visit—with an energy level and excitement that is unmatched by any other conference of its kind. Xangati is always thrilled to be part of VMworld, and this year’s show in Las Vegas was no different.

Xangati extends kudos to @bknudtson, @vseanclark and @theronconrey for organizing a great kick-off party at this year’s VMunderground WuPaaS. With bacon t-shirts and a bacon gift basket, we kept the pork (and ale) flowing all night long! Monday night’s Official Unofficial VMworld Community Tweetup gave us yet another chance to hook up with the vblogger and peep communities—and to give away some poker chips! A big thanks to @jtroyer for setting up a winner! 

Besides being incredibly fun, both events also gave us the opportunity to engage with some of our favorite vbloggers, customers and partners in a more casual setting. The Xangati team always looks forward to them—and hopes to sponsor more in the future!

With a Star Wars theme that seemed to really resonate with attendees, the force was especially strong with Xangati this year. For the second year in a row, Xangati won for “Virtualization Management” at the Best of VMworld awards program. The latest release of our Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) was recognized out of more than 40 nominees for its outstanding performance, functionality and value. 

In addition, the XMD took home the silver in Virtual Intelligence Briefing’s Emerging Technology Excellence Awards that were also announced at the show. Not to be outdone, Xangati for vSphere, was featured once again by @kendrickcoleman and @davidmdavis as one of the industry’s top ten free tools for VMware vSphere. You can see the video with all the winners here.

Listening closely to your needs has always been our #1 priority and—I believe—has directly influenced Xangati’s success—reflected not only by these awards but also from the tremendous attendee response at the show. Reactions to the XMD were overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and our message “The VI Admin Strikes Back” certainly ‘struck’ a chord. 

Beyond its clever marketing appeal (kudos team!), the Star Wars angle resonated because it’s rooted in reality. It is absolutely essential for VI managers to be able to accurately identify problem areas within the VI and communicate them to other business areas. The XMD gives them the necessary tools to do this—combating the blame game that frequently happens when no one can find the problem.

With 360-degree insights into all the dynamic interactions occurring throughout the infrastructure, Xangati allows you to fill in the holes, giving the confidence to virtualize your business-critical applications.

These insights are just as vital for deployments of VDI. Only a 360-degree view into all silos—and the continual interactions that are occurring between them—can guarantee performance spanning end-to-end across the VDI—and keep your end users satisfied.

Xangati fills in the gaps by continuously monitoring all of  the individual interactions—between both physical and virtual elements. This ability is exactly why VMware has selected Xangati for the past two years to manage its hands-on labs at VMworld. This year, over 13,000 labs were completed, 148,000 VMs were created and destroyed, and 131 TB of NFS traffic passed through the network in just 5 days. Our Performance Health Engine provided real-time health analyses for all of the moving parts—across storage, network, servers, desktops, clients and applications.  

And it moves. And it’s pretty—so pretty that it’s almost like ‘eye-candy’ for administrators. Really—everyone loves the look of this dashboard!

But—above all else—it’s functional. The real-time data it provides makes it valuable. Presenting the data in an easy-to-understand, intuitive fashion makes it usable. The price makes it doable for any organization.

New technologies can be intimidating, but you can’t fight change. Xangati helps you embrace the force of virtualization with the tools for success—harnessing virtualization with knowledge and defense. Without this knowledge, there is fear, and fear is the path to the dark side—a virtualized infrastructure that has no visibility, where you cannot see how one silo is impacting the other, and how one interaction might have grave implications for another. 

If we missed you at the show or you want to learn more about our virtualization management solutions—please, don’t hesitate to contact us. Call, email or tweet—we’re a responsive group! Also, get a taste of last week’s show by viewing our own @njiversen’s VMworld video here.

And—until we meet again—may the virtualization force be with you!

New Kid on the Block

Russel Wilkinson, Director Field Product Management, Xangati

I joined Xangati as a field product managemetn director about one month ago. Despite being the new kid on the block, Xangati has made me feel right at home.

And what a great time to join the Xangati team! The timing of my coming on board practically collided with the introduction of the Xangati VDI Dashboard! The energy and excitement surrounding the launch of this breakthrough product has been incredible—and with good reason.

Xangati has once again raised the bar for virtualization and cloud computing management with the first infrastructure performance management (IPM) solution that can fully track and support VDI to operational scale. The response to the product has been phenomenal—especially in regards to its Health Engine.

I’ve been a strong proponent of Xangati’s solutions for some time now—another reason why being here at Xangati feels so right. I was first introduced to Xangati’s solutions as a Desktop Specialist at VMware, where I worked with both engineering and sales teams.

While at VMware, I had read a blog written by a former colleague about the Xangati solution. I was looking for a way to extract more performance data from some of our VMware View 4 pilots and decided to give Xangati a shot. After evaluating the solution, I was sold!

With Xangati’s live-to-the-second views, we could characterize PCoIP, its load on the network, and compare it to what other traffic was sharing in the same network infrastructure. Seeing how these resources were interworking across the WAN gave us incredible insight, so that we could more rapidly identify and troubleshoot potential performance issues.

Following that initial experience, I had the pleasure of engaging further with the Xangati team on a number of internal and external projects. VMware leveraged the Xangati toolset for several customer events, as well as to manage the hands-on-labs at both VMworld San Francisco and VMworld Copenhagen. The Xangati solution was key to allowing us to track all of the VDI lab sessions end-to-end as they traversed the network.

I enjoyed more than six amazing years at VMware—at a time of incredible change in the industry—and certainly had no immediate plans to leave. But sometimes you come across an opportunity that’s just too good to be true, and you have to grab onto it. That’s how I feel about my move to Xangati. It’s professionally invigorating to be on a forward-thinking team with the engineering prowess and agility to develop and quickly bring to market these innovative solutions that contribute so significantly to the successful implementation of virtualization technologies.

The Xangati engineering discipline is amazing!

What can you expect from me? For starters, my attention will remain highly customer-focused. I’ve always paid close attention to real-world business needs at VMware and before that at Citrix.

At Xangati, we want to be sure to keep a close look on how we can continue to add the most value for you. We’re doing a pretty good job already, so we have a head start, but there’s always room for improvement. We want to make it even easier for the VI administrator to understand everything that’s occurring in the infrastructure—to help you succeed.

With a home base in Detroit, I’ll be moving around a lot—working closely with the Xangati sales team wherever I’m needed—and meeting frequently with you—our customers and partners. I want to get to know your unique business requirements, so that we can provide you with the best technology solution to meet them. 

Feel free to contact me! I’d love to hear from you and see how Xangati might be able to assist with your particular virtualization initiatives. You can also follow me on twitter @VirtualRussel.

I’m thrilled to be here and adding yet another role in my life—Dad to two awesome girls, husband to a wonderful wife and—now—new kid on the Xangati block!

Survivor VDI—Episode One: “Real” Timing is Everything

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

If you applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection or ‘survival of the fittest’ to the business world today, nowhere would it be more appropriate than in the financial industry. The financial sector is frequently turned to as a bellwether in its usage of cutting edge technologies for competitive advantage. And, with enormous monetary gains and losses frequently at stake, failure is not an option when implementing new IT solutions in the financial market.

Survivor VDI Music

(Enjoy listening to the Survivor Song, Ancient Voices, while reading the blog)

 

One of our European partners—ICF Systems, an IT systems company—recognized that VDI offered a unique opportunity—as well as a tremendous competitive edge—by improving on existing trading floor environments for their financial customers. By designing a virtual trading floor, traders could seamlessly and instantaneously access their desktops—exactly as they would on the trading floor—fully integrated with all the right exchanges and the key market feed services—from any location and any device.

By harnessing VDI technologies, ICF could design a system that would allow the traders to conduct all of their business from whatever device they wanted—whether a 3G iPad or their home PC. As we’ve talked about in previous blogs, this is significant, as users are increasingly pushing for total corporate access from a myriad of devices.

In addition, looking beyond that benefit, by centralizing the data center, ICF could also dramatically reduce equipment costs, as well as all but eliminate the time-consuming task of managing such a highly dispersed system.

Off the top, they had a few necessities. The system needed complete infrastructure independence; the highest possible execution speed; availability anywhere and anytime; and to-the-second disaster recovery.

Not a task for the faint-hearted!

But succeed ICF did and rolled out the industry’s first virtual trading floor—called Trading Anywhere—which is up and running today—allowing ICF customers to execute the same financial transactions at home or traveling on business that they make on a fixed trading room floor.

The question is—how did they survive the key obstacles on the way?

To answer that, I’d like you to consider time. Time represents the very essence of the financial trading industry. A trader’s survival hinges on the element of timing. No matter how innovative and cutting edge an IT solution might be, if it doesn’t support the real-time needs of the trading floor, it won’t work. Timing really is everything in financial trading.

ICF knew that their customers required real-time access to the best market intelligence in order to compete. If the new system slowed down due to a performance issue, the end-user experience would be irrevocably damaged—and the financial repercussions devastating. System downtime translates into lost deals.

As Harald Spanuth, Senior Technical Consultant at ICF, explains, “We knew that the successful implementation of a VMware View VDI solution required an entirely new level of management if it was to be successful. The significance of managing the infrastructure in real-time was of utmost priority.”

Xangati’s infrastructure performance management (IPM) solution is unique in its ability to provide real-time visibility into all VDI activity across the VI and the WAN—encompassing real-time views of all devices spanning both the physical and virtual infrastructures. Having insights into all network activity presented in live, continuous views, gave ICF the troubleshooting capabilities to quickly and easily identify and resolve potential performance problems.

With the Xangati Management Dashboard, ICF can rely on a single dashboard to navigate through the infrastructure and to drill down to where a problem might be—even while it was occurring—i.e., “real” time.

Survivor lesson: The many moving parts in a VDI ecosystem—particularly one where time is of the essence—demand an accurate, timely and comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure. In addition, real-time management capabilities are essential for identifying shifts in storage or network latency across the WAN. Without real-time latency measurements, VI administrators can be inundated with calls even when their systems are still green. What’s up with that?!!

Fortunately, Xangati’s real-time management solution allows VI administrators to cover all their bases—providing a view into physical and virtual components, continuously analyzing the infrastructure and alerting administrators immediately of any changes.

See you at the next Survivor VDI tribal council!