A couple of weeks ago I was briefed by Load Dynamix about the upcoming merger between Virtual Instruments and Load Dynamix. I think it’s a great move, they are highly complementary to each other and the sum of their technology/products is more than just a mathematical addition.
Who are LD and VI?
These two companies are not familiar to most of the customers but are quite popular in the high end and among vendors.
LD is all about performance benchmarking. It’s like having an IOZone on steroids. It’s actually an oversimplification, but gives you the idea of what they do. The product suite is composed now by different products, hardware and software, that can collect information on your workloads, analyze, scale, and reproduce them for any purpose (mostly testing).
The uses cases are more than you would think. From PoCs with vendors, to infrastructure test (stress test for example) and so on. The workloads reproduced from the appliance is amazingly accurate and covers Block, file and object protocols.
VI is on the other side of the fence. VirtualWisdom (this is the name of the main product), scans all the storage traffic with hardware and software probes and analyzes it to find any kind of issue. The goal is to avoid problems which would otherwise be very difficult to detect, especially in large infrastructures. In fact, some of the nastiest problems are also the hardest to find and correct…
Both of them are unique in the market and they are not competing with each other.
Why together?
Both of them are unique in the market and they are not competing with each other. They also share the same customer type!
LD works with large IT organizations which have more than $1M of storage spending per year and storage vendors, while VI works mostly in the Fortune 500 space and partners with all the major storage vendors for sales and consulting.
But there is more. By integrating the two engineering teams they’ll be able to do even more! Both of them have pieces of the puzzle and now they’ll be able to give the end users a unique end-to-end solution that can cover monitoring->analytics->performance->testing.
To the benefit of end users
In the last year I’ve had the chance to speak many times with both VI and LD. End users adopting their solutions really love them. And not because they are nice or they do really advanced things from the technology point of view (which they do actually), but because they simply contribute to major cost cutting! In both of the cases the results are impressive, especially in the most critical of environments.
Now that the whole product line-up will be integrated I think they’ll be able to do even more by adding additional features and by closing some holes they have in their respective products. The potential is high and I hope they can take advantage of it.
The potential is high and I hope they can take advantage of it.
Closing the circle
I think LD and VI have done the right thing. Their growth is limited on their own (also because their target market has a limited number of potential customers) but their products are really compelling, and this merger will allow them to consolidate their technology and vision, enabling them to build better end-to-end solutions.
I think this merger will accelerate product development and that analytics will become more and more important in their proposition.
Furthermore I think this merger will accelerate product development and that analytics will become more and more important in their proposition. In fact now they are in the right position to analyze the entire storage stack, collect data and potentially build a database with measured workloads, allowing users to get a good insight on how applications and the infrastructure are working compared to other similar configurations… and potentially offer these services to a larger number of customers.
Disclaimer: Load Dynamix is a sponsor of TECHunplugged in London on 12/5
If you want to know more about this topic, I’ll be presenting at next TECHunplugged conference in London on 12/5/16. A one day event focused on cloud computing and IT infrastructure with an innovative formula combines a group of independent, insightful and well-recognized bloggers with disruptive technology vendors and end users who manage rich technology environments. Join us!
