Case Study: Global Diversified Manufacturing Company eliminates NFS-to-FC performance slowdowns and optimizes application scalability with Virtana's VirtualWisdom

Utilizing VirtualWisdom ProbeNAS to solve NFS performance problems

Global Diversified Manufacturing Company, a $20B diversified global manufacturer, was experiencing NetApp NFS filer performance problems that degraded a mission‑critical application running on an IBM SSD-based block FC array; the short-term workaround was repeatedly deleting and recreating files. As a long-time customer of Virtana, the Company engaged Virtana for an Infrastructure Performance Assessment (IPA) and used Virtana’s VirtualWisdom and the NAS Performance Probe (ProbeNAS) to investigate the NAS/NFS and FC interactions.

Virtana Professional Services instrumented and baselined two filers with VirtualWisdom and the NAS Performance Probe, empirically correlating NAS-to-FC traffic and proving the need for a second, dedicated filer for the MC application. Virtana’s analysis eliminated guesswork, showed the dedicated filer supported significantly more files with read/write latencies at or below the original filer, and led the Company to purchase a NAS Performance Probe to complement existing SAN monitoring—helping avoid costly downtime (analysts estimate severe IT outages can exceed $21K per minute).