Professor John Graham of Indiana University points out that “large amounts of resources are devoted to slight or speculative dangers while substantial and well-documented dangers remain unaddressed”.  It has been well established that people often too much weight is placed on risks of low probability.  Such is the dilemma of complexity within IT infrastructure.  We often talk about hackers, malware, floods, fires, earthquakes, and tornados; while the real crisis is happening right under our nose and it has well over 5,000 risk signatures.  This crisis is the complexity in the IT infrastructure and it is causing considerable losses for companies.

The likelihood that an organization will experience a catastrophic loss from an IT failure is far greater than any catastrophic disaster or "black swan" event.   IT failures are costing companies trillions of dollars every year; worldwide downtime is estimated at over $35 Billion...

It is hard to find an IT organization that is not experiencing a tremendous amount of pressure when it comes to managing their data growth and I/O performance requirements. This is especially true in virtual environments as virtual machines are easy to spin up but have an impact on the amount of storage capacity required and on performance characteristics. 

In the two-part blog series below, DCIG highlights how Netapp storage systems seamlessly work with Symantec products, specifically Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) for VMware and Data Insight. Find out how these technologies can help you efficiently manage and control your structured and unstructured data and I/O performance in virtual environments. 

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As customers pack more virtual machines on physical servers, storage I/O bottlenecks that impact performance are unavoidable.  Because of this, customers are limited to the number of applications they can move to virtual machines.  Native tools address part of the problem, but do not provide granular I/O policies to keep performance and data availability at an optimal level.       

Symantec solves the entire problem with Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) for VMware. DMP for VMware is a solution that helps customers optimize performance and keep data available, even when a path fails.  DMP for VMware distributes I/O from server to storage based on seven pre-defined policies. These policies can be employed based on workload characteristics like read/write ratio, block size or sequential versus random access.  DMP for VMware includes visibility of the environment to not only show how paths are mapped from server to storage, but also the...