Case Study: Multinational Consumer Products Company achieves 75% fewer SAN trouble tickets with Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom

Virtual Instruments brings increased SAN efficiency and reduced OPEX to multinational consumer products company

Consumer Products Company, a multinational consumer goods manufacturer with a large and fast-growing SAN environment, was struggling to improve service levels while reducing OPEX and CAPEX. Its 12 petabyte SAN was growing 50% annually across more than 3,000 servers, but the lean IT team lacked visibility into fabric-level issues, making performance troubleshooting, capacity planning, and multi-pathing management difficult. Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom was selected to help monitor and understand the SAN more proactively.

Virtual Instruments implemented VirtualWisdom with SAN instrumentation and monitoring to uncover bottlenecks, validate paths, and improve utilization. The results were significant: trouble tickets dropped 75% within the first quarter, backup troubleshooting time fell from weeks to near-instant root cause analysis, and the company estimated about $2.7M in annual OPEX savings by managing the SAN with roughly one-quarter the staff of similar environments. Virtual Instruments also helped reduce outage risk, improve balancing across paths, and identify consolidation opportunities that could avoid future SAN spending.