Efficient and effective management of the virtual environment is a critical step towards long-term successful deployments of server and desktop virtualization. The sharing of physical resources that support the virtual layers can pose management challenges especially when sizing, optimizing, and troubleshooting storage within a virtual infrastructure. The Akorri BalancePoint product suite provides IT the ability to quickly and easily manage and maintain the physical and virtual storage infrastructure - optimized to serve applications. This FOCUS Brief describes the factors driving IT to seek improved manageability of storage within the virtual infrastructure, and details Akorri’s BalancePoint solution, listing key benefits.  The Brief concludes with a FOCUS assessment.

Keywords: storage management, virtual infrastructure management, discovery, mapping, visualization, virtualization, fault management, root cause analysis, cross-domain analysis, performance modeling, application fingerprinting, VMware, performance management, server virtualization