back to article Want to know the key to storage happiness? It’s analytics. Yeah, it’s that simple

What are you looking for in a new storage system? Performance, capacity, efficiency, data services? Well, from my point of view you should be looking for analytics first! The right analytics tool can easily save you money, time, and make your job easier. Jack of all trades, master of the infrastructure It’s not only about …

  1. Lee McEvoy

    Analytics separated from the storage system

    Multivendor is often harder than we'd hope (not everyone bothers doing anything above "bare minimum" for SMI-S), but I know a lot of people are working on it.

    IBM have something that works for all their arrays - I've had good feedback from customers that have tried it.

    https://goo.gl/qvDqZH

  2. M. B.

    InfoSight...

    ...is the reason we like using Nimble with our managed services customers. The supports teams don't worry much about the arrays themselves, they simply consume and occasionally troubleshoot.

    But they are not "storage people", typically they are generalists who only care that 1) it's fast enough; 2) there's enough capacity; and 3) it has no single point of failure. The nice thing about InfoSight is that when they start running into issues, it's dead simple for our storage specialists to analyse the data and make informed decisions as to how to proceed.

    That keeps our managed services support teams busy supporting customers and their apps, and our storage specialists busy doing storagey things.

  3. Simon P

    OnCommand InSight

    I think this is a key issue with large estates, and it need to include visualization layer as well. NetApp has been growing the OnCommand Insight products recently and it is a standalone product and supports all major vendors.

    The key issue we see with Infrastructure analytic is not just gathering the information but showing it in format the reader can understand and use to change the way they make decisions.

    A tool these days also needs to monitor off premise Infrastructure, cloud/hybrid cloud so a view of entire estate can be seen.

    1. mtuber

      Re: OnCommand InSight

      On Command Insight is a nice product but it's not related to this discussion. It's a different product for those who have primarily fabrics comprised of a diverse set of vendors and assuming they can afford it. What is discussed in this article would be comparable to Autosupport and the combination of On Command Unified Manager and Performance Manager.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: OnCommand InSight

      OCI is frighteningly expensive and complex and your last comment just smacks of salesmanship.

      A customer or SP (and this includes the vast majority) with an on-premise estate of compute/networking/storage needs a simple, low maintenance, low impact tool which is highly intuitive and which provides detailed analysis of this infrastructure from any perspective allowing managers and technical staff to make informed decisions.

      Everything which OCI isnt.

  4. CJVI

    This is a great description of how to make life easier and more efficient. The important things to consider are being able to continuously see the whole whole infrastructure at line speed. Infrastructure Performance Management platforms should be agentless and not put load on the system. Once you have the best data from all sources this can be correlated to give the view of performance and utilisation levels. This information can then be analysed and delivered in an easy to understand form on a single screen.

    As many vendors realise the importance of Infrastructure Performance Management they are claiming to offer complete solutions - but beware as data gathered over time and averaged or gathered from just the switch or other single element do not give you the realtime system-wide solution you need.

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