John W. Thompson, CEO of Virtual Instruments, isn’t any stranger to taking the reins of large corporate edifices as Symantec former CEO and current Chairman of the Board. His new role at Virtual Instruments finds him lording over a company that develops solutions for understanding that happens deep within the infrastructure of storage area networks (SANs) and other highly virtualized and broad bandwidth communication networks.

Today in theCube, he sat down with John Furrier and Dave Vellante to speak about the challenges that he’s seen growing out of and alongside the business model of Virtual Instruments.

VMworld 2011 is all about how VMware is bringing about the architecture of the future by driving virtualization into the deepest core of computing. Thompson believes that VMware has been a thought leader when it comes to virtualization, in fact the economics surrounding virtualization are proving to be true; VMware was certainly a leader in the x86 space, but now it’s spreading across the entire stack. While the concept of virtualization isn’t new, having it applied to all those tiers is in fact a new phenomenon. This poses a new set of challenges for customers.

The result: networking infrastructures continue to get more complex and obfuscated under arcane and multipart systems that are simply crying out for a holistic approach to understanding what’s happening under the hood. Virtual Instruments delivers the suite of tools to dive into these systems and provide deep probes into fiber infrastructures to find problems and allow solutions and planning companies to make the networks more efficient. Also, having better situational awareness means that companies can get ahead of potential future problems before they happen.

Virtual Instruments has a heritage as a SAN optimization company but they’ve grown beyond that into delivering solutions for monitoring the end-to-end transaction performance for entire systems from servers, to storage arrays, to I/O fabric, and attempt to untangle the skein of workloads and efficiency to get granular latency level performance insight. This makes Thompson’s corporation extremely unique and highly valuable to the industry.

The epic story of PayPal and Virtual Instruments: No more outages

When asked to relay the story of a particular customer, Tompson regaled Furrier with the tale of PayPal. As an Internet financial institution, PayPal is directly tied to performance and availability as part of its business model—after all, if a customer encounters a failure, they have a huge number of competitors and rivals to turn to. As a result, PayPal can easily translate availability problems directly into value.

Prior to Virtual Instruments, Thompson said, PayPal suffered perhaps two outages a year; since Virtual Instruments, PayPal has seen virtually none at all. This can be tied directly back to Virtual Instruments’s assistance in understanding the bottlenecks and potential issues across the Internet financial institution’s networks.

At the end of the day, he points out, Virtual Instruments is a monitoring company: it doesn’t do planning, doesn’t do design or development, and just provides the tools to understand and demystify the inner engine of networks so that other companies (of which there are many) to bring better solutions and affect change. Virtual Instruments is happy where they’re focused right now and there’s no need to dilute that focus by becoming a management tool.

Coming from a heritage of SAN optimization into a real solution within the virtualization phenomenon

In the early days of Virtual Instrument’s existence they showed up on the doorstep of any company who had obvious uptime problems; since then, the market has become more aware of VI’s technology and now they offer SAN assessments of people who haven’t yet seen giant issues. This allows companies to see where Virtual Instruments could be valuable in proactive defense against their SAN suffering an outage or approaching an outage.

Today Virtual Instruments has 140 employees, and Thompson believes that they have only barely scratched the surface of the virtual infrastructure optimization and management interfaces.

With the exponential growth of the ecosystem of virtualization, the deep impact of VMware across the entire stack, he sees Virtual Instruments growing along with this phenomenon and he expects it to “catch more wind in its sails” as people discover that using Virtual Instruments technology will save them a lot of pain and discomfort as they move into the virtualization space.