The Internet of Things could make or break your business  

IoT helps both consumers and companies across a wide variety of functions but at its heart, the technology is designed to modify our behaviour through the provision and interpretation of data. This could involve being prompted to consume less fatty foods or to avoid a particular route on which a traffic accident has occurred. While IoT is still in its early days, the volume of data produced by ‘things’ is already staggering and it is only set to rise. In fact, Gartner forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, with this number rising to 25 billion by 2020. One of the biggest challenges is to make sense of these vast amounts of data in real-time. To analyse these datasets in order to produce useful nuggets of information requires a near-flawless IT infrastructure that is running optimally throughout.

If your organisation is planning to internet-enable its applications to become part of the Internet of Things, there are a number of technical obstacles that must be addressed first. The primary challenge is underpinned by the fact that applications are all eventually connected to a physical infrastructure. The highest priority is therefore to ensure that your infrastructure is performing well throughout. Internet-enabled applications, just like any other application, perform down to the pace of the slowest component. It is critical to ensure that servers, switches, network and storage are all performing, as you would expect under load before you design and build the APIs for the IoT to connect to.
Last impressions count
Last year I was at Gartner’s 2014 Infrastructure and Operations Management conference. The keynote speaker reminded us about how parents of a particular generation would teach their children that a firm handshake is paramount as first impressions are everything. Today, this assumption has been turned on its head: with internet-enabled technology it’s ‘last impressions that count.’ You could have been running a data centre for five years without a hitch but if a customer or user has to wait more than a second or two to get what they want, they will very likely give up and go and get it from somewhere else. This trend is only becoming more and more pronounced as competition becomes evermore fierce. The importance of the performance of the underlying infrastructure where these applications are running is paramount to ensuring high speed response at the front-end of an application cannot be over stressed.
Do your research
It is also critical to know what the predicted incoming traffic is going to be and to plan accordingly. With unstructured streaming you can’t expect a structured infrastructure to cope unless it is massively over-provisioned, and the reason you are implementing virtualization and cloud strategies is to avoid costs of excessive hardware. The way round this to implement an Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) platform that shows exactly what the incoming datacentre workflow is at line speed (not averaged over time), end to end, through the servers, switches and storage, so you can right-size the hardware elements not just to cope, but to out-perform your competitors. By monitoring and planning using real-time applied analytics, historical growth and traffic information you will be able to set an application performance SLA.

The importance of corporate culture
IT is becoming faster and more efficient, but also more complex. Furthermore, modern infrastructures are becoming increasingly virtualised and abstract, leaving IT managers with greater challenges surrounding visibility. More than ever before, today’s IT teams must have access to information related to how all elements of the infrastructure are performing, in a single view. We can no longer reasonably expect an IT team to simply manage the storage or the server and leave the rest to someone else to worry about.
Internet-enabling, virtualisation and cloud technologies are about efficiency and cost savings so the IT team needs to monitor the whole infrastructure and be able to react quickly to change. The days of over-provisioning to guarantee application performance and each department blaming each other when there is a latency issue or outage are well and truly over. The consequence of such a business culture is threatening to not just the bottom line but also to the company’s survival in what is a highly competitive landscape.
Is your business ready for the Internet of Things?
Service providers, mobile network operators and consumer facing businesses are all gearing up for the Internet of Things. Indeed, it is likely to become an unparalleled competitive advantage for some businesses. Cisco forecasts IoT to represent a $19 trillion opportunity for businesses between 2014 and 2024. But in order to exploit this exciting technology that has the potential to make our real environment as malleable and measurable as the virtual one in which IT professionals operate, the foundations must be solid. Due to the vast amount of information that needs to be stored and interpreted – often in real-time – IoT requires nothing less than an optimally working infrastructure. This can only be realised if we provide our IT teams with a full view of this infrastructure using an Infrastructure Performance Management platform.

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Infrastructure performance management is
key to the Internet of Things
AS IT infrastructures have migrated to open-systems to leverage “best-of-breed” technologies, the enterprise user has been forced to pick storage/storage virtualisers, switches, adapters, physical hosts, and other components from multiple competing vendors and designs, then configure and operate these in a system that is made unique by the combination of all these variables.

This model only allows IT to optimize the subsystem components, not the performance of the system as a whole. Virtual Wisdom is the first and only Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) platform that provides system-wide visibility into a breadth and depth of metrics never before available. With continuous monitoring, in real-time, and unbiased and definitive insight into the true performance, health and utilization of the multi-vendor, multi-layer infrastructure, Virtual Wisdom allows enterprise users to guarantee performance and availability while reducing costs.
The VirtualWisdom 4 solution is made up of multiple components. The VirtualWisdom Platform is composed of a powerful, fully integrated combination of the VirtualWisdom Management Software, and the dedicated Platform Appliance.

By delivering this powerful combination of purpose built hardware and software, all fully developed and tested in house at Virtual Instruments, we are able to ensure the highest levels of performance, scalability and serviceability. This platform leverages metrics provided by a robust suite of software and hardware probes that collect data from throughout the end-to-end infrastructure.