Q&A with Jay Kramer of Astute Networks

VSM: What does Astute Networks do?

JK: Astute Networks develops innovative products that increase the performance of virtual machines in a VMware environment. They eliminate the problem of slow IO performance called “virtual crawl” that prevents the widespread use of VMware in organizations of all sizes. We developed a patented architecture called Networked Performance Flash that lets our products deliver added performance to any VM in their environment as they need it, over a LAN.

It enables game-changing efficiencies, including:

• Instantaneous access to datastores for databases and other I/O intensive applications
• The scalability to deploy more virtual machines per physical server
• The cost effectiveness and centralized management efficiencies of deploying virtual desktop environments
• Fast backup and recovery throughput to address the data protection needs of our customers

Our producsts are complete solutions with the flexibilty to be deployed and managed on-premise and in the cloud.

VSM: What is the market Astute Networks serves?

JK: Astute Networks is focused on serving customers in the mid-range and enterprise markets that have deployed VMware. We are positioned for SME (small to medium enterprise) and above. We address businesses large and small that want to realize the full benefits of virtualization by implementing it throughout their enterprise. We have the greatest impact in this market because our target customers have already seen the benefits of VMware firsthand and want to extend those benefits to more of their tier 1 killer apps and business critical databases. Customers can start with a single Astute Networks solution and then grow to large scale deployments at price/performance levels unmatched in the marketplace today.

VSM: Customers today are challenged with getting virtualization to their entire infrastructure, especially where it is very I/O intensive. What challenges are you solving for customers?

JK: Industry data shows that the vast majority of companies that have started to virtualize their infrastructure still have not virtualized a very high percentage of their production servers. The reason for this starts with the core foundation that virtual environments dramatically increase the amount of IOPs that need to be processed. Without sufficient random IOPS of performance, IO-intensive application, databases, and desktops are too slow. Using enterprise disk to add performance is inefficient and extremely expensive to buy and to maintain. Other flash-based performance products don’t fully support VMware features and they can have their own performance limitations as well.

As a result, customers have a large untapped potential for virtualization, including email (Exchange), databases (Oracle, SAP, SQL), collaboration applications (SharePoint), and desktops. They want to extend the benefits of virtualization – consolidation, utilization, backup improvements, higher reliability – to the rest of their IT infrastructure whether in data centers, remote office and branch offices (ROBOs) or replicated disaster recovery (DR) centers.