Appliance Performance: Looking Inward to Maximize Value

One of the most important things infrastructure operations does is to align available technology resources to the activities that will drive the most business value. This is particularly true when the technology is multitasking and supporting business needs that are constantly changing.

Adapting to change is one of the competitive strengths of our software defined appliances and modular analytics. Rather than lock each appliance into one type of activity (e.g., capture, discovery, decoding, analytics, dashboarding and exploration, etc.), each Corvil appliance provides the full suite of capabilities to reduce the data center footprint and total cost of ownership.

In addition, Corvil offers a moveable feast of software modules, Analytic Plug-ins, workflow-specific actions and integrations to suit a variety of needs. Customers can choose what analytics modules they wish to run on any appliance, and therefore have the flexibility to align the hardware resources to their analysis needs and the unique demands of their environment.

Flexibility and Control

Traditionally, most vendors have provided limited visibility into appliance performance and capacity consumption drivers. A few instruments are offered to understand if there is capacity, perhaps, but not the controls to align, and realign, analysis and resources to business needs as they evolve.

Corvil’s Appliance Performance Dashboard provides unequaled visibility to keep users in control and provides the flexibility to allow them to maximize resources where most needed. It provides a more detailed understanding of:

• Analytic workloads to assure that processing power is matched to business needs
• Resource utilization for improving capacity planning with insight into consumption through the busiest periods
• Data capture and compression rates to maximize the available packet capture history.

The endgame of this measurement is to help technology teams to prioritize and adapt efficiently to business needs as well as extend the capacity of their appliances by load shedding less critical functions.

For example, one of our customers recently carried out a health-check using our Appliance Performance Dashboard. They discovered that an HTTP analytic plug-in, switched on for a previous project, was the primary consumer of CPU resources. Since HTTP traffic was not critical to the trading flows the business was now interested in analyzing, the allocation of appliance resources to business value of the analysis delivered was no longer aligned.

The team then tuned workloads by switching the HTTP Analytic Plug-in to detect-only mode, which is computationally less expensive. Since then, everything has been running better and the business’ use of Corvil analysis is where it needs to be to achieve a competitive advantage.

As another Corvil user put it: “In the new data era, data is everything. Data is power. Data is knowledge. Corvil does exactly that. It captures data and does a lot of good stuff with the data."

Learn more about Corvil Appliance Performance Dashboard