Condusiv's New V-locity 5 Targets Improved App Performance In Virtual, Physical Environments

Condusiv Technologies released a new version of its V-locity software for boosting application performance in virtual and physical infrastructures while at the same time adding resources to help channel partners better take advantage of the technology.

The new version, V-locity 5, builds on the company's V-locity I/O optimization software, which aims to increase application performance in virtual, physical and cloud environments by 50 percent or more, said Nick Tidd, senior vice president of global sales for Burbank, Calif.-based Condusiv.

V-locity 5 shows that the vendor is now focused squarely on enterprise customer needs, said Kevin Vogl, vice president of virtualization and cloud at Champion Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider and Condusiv channel partner.

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"I love the new management interface," Vogl told CRN. "It's something they didn't have before. It seems real easy to use."

Champion Solutions Group has partnered with Condusiv for about a year ever since the solution provider first tested the vendor's technology in its own lab, Vogl said.

"When we first brought Condusiv into our lab, we put it on our fastest servers in our best environment, and it still doubled our throughput," he said. "That sold us. We're looking forward to testing the new version."

Selling Condusiv's technology is different than selling other solutions because of the number of IT managers who believe that their environments are fully optimized, Vogl said.

Condusiv has done a good job with helping understand how to approach customers, Vogl said. "A lot of IT guys are sensitive," he said. "We might walk in and talk about problems they are having with VMware or other technologies, and they reply, 'No we don't.' So we say, 'How would you like to improve your performance?' Customers are rightfully proud of the environments they have built. They think they're running optimally."

Tidd, citing IDC numbers, said that the amount of data is expected to grow 75 times and I/O to grow 125 times over the next 10 years. That I/O explosion will come primarily from physical servers running multiple virtual machines, he said.

"Virtualization acts like a funnel, combining multiple data streams," he said. "You also get a blender effect as multiple virtual machines stream to disk at the same time."

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Compounding the problem is inefficient writing of I/Os by the Windows operating system as it breaks a single file into several pieces to write to disk, as well as inefficient read I/O caused by the need to read data multiple times as it travels between the processor and disk, Tidd said.

V-locity helps mitigate these issues with IntelliWrite, a technology built for virtualized environments to optimize write I/Os by optimizing the I/Os before they enter servers, storage and networking, Tidd said.

Another technology, IntelliMemory, reduces I/Os on the storage layers by intelligently caching data ahead of time, he said.

V-locity also includes behavior analytics that gathers data from IntelliWrite and IntelliMemory to increase performance, along with intelligent caching using SSDs, he said. "There's no need to performance-tune V-locity," he said. "It's set and forget."

New to V-locity 5 is Benefit Analyzer, a before-and-after performance comparison solution providers can do at a customer site using the customer's own actual workloads.

"Benefit Analyzer allows partners to validate the benefits of V-locity," Tidd said. "IT may not be the budget holder. But IT can use Benefit Analyzer to show proof of the validation."

Also new is V-locity's first built-in management console, which Tidd said is both enterprise-ready and cloud-ready. V-locity Management Console is a Web-based technology that manages physical, virtualized and cloud deployments via a single pane of glass. It also works across midsize and large-scale deployments, he said.

"V-locity Management Console will allow large deployments across multiple environments," said Tidd.

V-locity also now auto-detects and auto-installs in both physical and virtualized environments, he said.

PUBLISHED MARCH 26, 2014