Tech Field Day VFD3 – The best physics is CloudPhysics!

I have a kind of special place in my heart for the folks at CloudPhysics. Just from their name they cover two of my favorite things: Cloud and Physics. More than that though, I have been lucky to be involved in early tech briefings with the team there. For those who have been following me for a while, you also would have seen that we were lucky enough to have Irfan Ahmad (CloudPhysics Co-founder and CTO) present at the Toronto VMUG the day that they launched their product and GA.

What is this CloudPhysics thing all about?

There is an interesting thing happening at CloudPhysics in both the technical and business aspect:

about-cloudphysics
Image courtesy of CloudPhysics.com http://www.cloudphysics.com/about-us/index.php

It isn’t just the Big Data aspect of CloudPhysics that makes it stand out from anyone else though, it is the distinctly original way that they let their customers leverage it.

working-band1Pick a card, any card!

If you don’t already know about how CloudPhysics works, you begin by deploying the CloudPhysics collector using their easily downloadable OVA file (full deployment process here: http://www.cloudphysics.com/getting-started/installing.php).

Once you are up and running, you log into the CloudPhysics site and within a short while, you will have data center analytics showing up in your dashboard (also called the Deck). This is where the fun comes in! CloudPhysics uses what they call cards to manage the details that you see in your Deck.

Using the available cards, you will be able to see useful sets of data about your environment that let you see what the big picture is across all aspects of your virtual data center.

card-glossary

This is just a taste of the available card glossary, and the great thing about these cards is that they come from both the CloudPhysics team, and the community that is running the product in their data center.

The card builder is a simple interface which lets you drag and drop your measurement points into your custom card, and then as quick as you can imagine, your card is pulling live data from your actual statistics.

1 Billion Data Points

What makes the analytics coming out of CloudPhysics even more impressive is that your data points are being used to provide content for your Deck, but the collective data points from hundreds of customers is being pooled together to create a massive data set to give us a view of how the averages come out across many hundreds of data centers.

How many data points you ask? How about 1 Billion (yes B as in Bob, Billion) data points per day! And in case you were worried about the sensitivity of the content in there, the data that feeds the cards is actually metadata for those metrics, and all customer data with any potentially sensitive content is held securely away from the metadata content.

Community Edition FTW!

CloudPhysics strongly embraces the IT community in many ways, and one of the ways this happens is that you can run CloudPhysics in your environment for free using the Community Edition.

editions

This is often called the freemium model because you can run the product, and then you can unlock the features as you desire. CloudPhysics is product delivery done right in my opinion because of their recognition that letting you use the product will give you the opportunity to choose your level of commitment once you see the value. This is my kind of product!

Removing the guesswork from data center performance

Using the Deck, you will see exactly how your data center is performing both internally, and up against the average deployments that are out in the wild as well.

One thing I’ll touch on before I go here is the really cool advanced feature: HA Simulator. Using the HA Simulator, you can apply a “what if?” scenario against your actual data center configuration (based on the current utilization and historical metrics) and it will predict the outcome of making changes to your HA topology. This lets you analyze potential performance challenges you may have if you make hardware changes in your HA environment.

Find out more and give it a try!

Start out by following the CloudPhysics on Twitter (@CloudPhysics), then read up on the product at http://www.cloudphysics.com and be sure to take the 30-day trial to see how CloudPhysics can help you see the big picture!

 

DISCLOSURE: Travel and expenses for Tech Field Day – Virtualization Field Day 3 were provided by the Tech Field Day organization. No compensation was received for attending the event. All content provided in my posts is of my own opinion based on independent research and information gathered during the sessions.

 

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