Storage vendor Coraid is jumping into the machine data analytics fray with a new data center monitoring tool and a strategic partnership with Big Data titan Splunk.

Coraid says that its newly announced EtherCloud Insight platform enables enterprises to gain visibility into their infrastructure without deploying legacy analysis tools that utilize “intrusive third-party instrumentation.” It also offers data center operators a cost-effective alternative to blindingly over-provisioning their environments or creating multiple storage silos.

EtherCloud leverages sensors situated at various endpoints of the storage network to track throughput, latency, IOPS, IO patterns, block size and queue depth with minimal impact on overall performance, according to the company. It supports Linux, VMware, Solaris and Windows servers, as well as Coraid’s storage appliances.

The platform can be accessed either graphically or programmatically, and real-time and historical data can be analyzed using third party solutions.

“Data center operators have struggled to resolve storage performance issues in virtualized and cloud environments due to a lack of real-time, end-to-end visibility. EtherCloud Insight is the first platform that can deliver advanced performance analytics across the entire data path: server, network and storage layers,” stated Coraid CEO Kevin Brown. “EtherCloud Insight delivers powerful, fine-grained analytics to reduce downtime, simplify performance troubleshooting and reduce over-provisioning in growing storage environments.”

Coraid’s second announcement is a strategic partnership with Splunk to make the latter’s machine data analytics software available for customers. The vendor touts that its “Virtual DAS” technology simplified data aggregation and processing by allowing users to scale storage independently from compute.

Earlier this month, Splunk joined forces with data visualization specialist Pentaho to deliver a comprehensive data analysis and integration solution. The platform can ingest information from enterprise apps, relational databases, Hadoop and NoSQL implementations. And not too long after that Splunk rolled out an app for VMware 3.0 to provide more granular insights into virtualized environments–a big effect in cloud deployments already.