DataON MUST (Management Utility Software Tool) Native Extension for Windows Admin Center

DataON , storage division of Area Electronics Systems, Inc., announces the its MUST (Management Utility Software Tool) native extension for Windows Admin Center (previously known as ‘Project Honolulu’).

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MUST provides cluster monitoring, performance metrics, system health statistics, and automated system alerts for Windows Server 2019 and 2016 Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica:

• Software-Defined Data Center & Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Tier – Provides system-level information on performance, capacity, hardware inventory and faults/alerts. The dashboard-level view displays operations, analytics, infrastructure health management, storage systems metrics and event logging insights.
• Hyper-Converged Cluster/Node Tier – Provides pool, volume and device-level performance, health and operational analytics for a HCI cluster. This enables to proactively perform systems maintenance and better understand requirements for workload migrations.
• Systems and Storage Services Audit Log Tier – Provides detailed logging-level visibility for events, to perform root cause analysis and export source data for analytics.

With the Windows Admin Center software develop kit (SDK), MUST natively integrates with Windows Admin Center to provide end-to-end hyper-converged infrastructure monitoring and management capabilities from a single pane of glass.

MUST complements Windows Admin Center
by providing additional features such as:

• Historic data reporting – Provides real-time and monthly dashboards of system performance data including IO/s, latency, throughput on cluster, storage pool, volume, and nodes.
• Disk mapping – MUST displays the device types and components in each of the nodes, providing a disk map of the entire node. It shows the number of disks, disk type, location and slot of each drive, and disk health status.
• System alerts – Leverages Windows Health Service faults to identify hardware failures, configuration issues, and resource saturation. Prompted by system alerts, administrators can have automated email alerts sent to key contacts. It also provides a multi-level assessment of specific locations, fault descriptions, and recovery actions. You can also leverage third-party SNMP monitoring traps to alert you when you need disk or hardware replacements.
• SAN-like call home service – As a value-added cloud service, the call home service integrates customer MUST alert services with the DataON Support portal and DataON support services to deliver 24×7 infrastructure support.

DataON was the first company to provide a robust visibility, monitoring and management tool for Windows Server 2016 HCI deployments.

“The DataON MUST native extension for Windows Admin Center represents DataON’s latest innovation for Windows Server-based environments,” said Howard Lo, VP sales and marketing, DataON. “We’ve taken our standalone MUST visibility, monitoring, and management tool and fully integrated it within the Windows Admin Center tool. Customers will benefit from the expanded capabilities of MUST, and the combination of MUST and Windows Admin Center from a single integrated console will provide the ultimate management experience for Windows Server-based infrastructures.”

“DataON continues to maximize the delivery of customer value through our partner ecosystem,” said Samuel Li, principal program manager lead for Windows Server management experiences, Microsoft Corporation. “DataON has delivered tighter integration and user experience consistency, simplified setup and richer functionality. The latest version of the DataON MUST extension for Windows Admin Center leverages a large set of our SDK capabilities and it continues to be one of our showcase partner extensions. I am grateful for the DataON partnership and their assistance in validating our SDK for broader release readiness. Customers have complete end-to-end management tools for DataON’s Windows Server software-defined solutions, through Windows Admin Center features and the extended capabilities provided by DataON MUST.”

Windows Admin Center
Windows Admin Center is the modernized and simplified tool set for managing Windows Server – it’s server management re-imagined. Evolving from familiar tools like Server Manager and MMC, Windows Admin Center is a lightweight, browser-based, customer-deployed solution with no agent installation required on target servers, and it comes at no extra cost beyond the Windows license. Windows Admin Center strengthens the security of managing server environments by leveraging existing security technologies.

It complements existing management solutions like System Center and Azure security and management.

As the future of Windows Server management, Windows Admin Center surfaces a new user interface for hyper-converged clusters and new Windows Server features like Storage Migration Services, System Insights, Storage Replica, and Software Defined Networking. Windows Admin Center goes beyond traditional server management by making it easy to leverage the power of Azure from on-premises or hybrid environments.

Extensibility has been built into the architecture of Windows Admin Center from its inception. Using the Windows Admin Center SDK, technology partners can build seamless experiences in Windows Admin Center, giving users an integrated and customizable experience that best meets their management needs.

DataON Difference
The company is focused on customers who have made the ‘Microsoft choice’ to deploy a Windows Server-based storage solution.

DataON has been named to CIO Review‘s 20 Most Promising Microsoft Solution Providers 2018.

Its team of Microsoft experts know how to design, deploy and support Windows Server storage and will work with you to performance tune your workloads with benchmarks.

DataON solutions are:

• Customer-proven with over 650 enterprise deployments and greater than 150PB of Storage Spaces Direct deployments.
• Certified for Windows Server 2016 and 2019 Server Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) Premium and Standard editions. Also certified for Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 (future).
• Certified for the Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) program, with hyper-converged solutions for high level of performance, manageability, and security offered.
• Certified as an Intel Select Solution for Windows Server Software-Defined Storage, with Plus configurations for the most bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive environments.

Read also:
DataON Management Utility Software Tool for Windows Admin Center and Windows Server 2016
Visibility, monitoring, and management tool enhances Windows Admin Center experience with additional tools and features
2018.05.10 | Press Release