NetApp OnCommand Performance Manager

Glenn Rhodes, senior director of product marketing, NetApp, Inc., said: “As organizations begin the transition to software-defined service delivery, optimal storage and data management will be critical to their success. Organizations must have the ability to monitor trends in their data center, understand performance goals and the attainment of those goals, and improve control over their storage environment. NetApp’s new OnCommand product offerings directly enable our customers to focus on rich, integrated, automated IT service delivery.”

NetApp helps IT accelerate the industry transition to software-defined data centers by providing a set of patented storage and data management technologies designed to accelerate storage provisioning, automate repetitive manual tasks, increase availability, and improve operational efficiency in both SAN and NAS environments.

The company introduced OnCommand Performance Manager, new software to monitor and troubleshoot a customer’s clustered Data ONTAP environment. In addition, it introduced technology updates to NetApp OnCommand Unified Manager, OnCommand Workflow Automation, and OnCommand Insight, providing further storage management, automation, and protection for faster IT service delivery.

With OnCommand, enterprises of all sizes can better enable, control, automate, and analyze a cost-efficient storage management infrastructure. With Data ONTAP at their core, OnCommand tools help IT optimize storage utilization, meet SLAs, minimize risk, boost performance, and deliver nondisruptive operations.

By updating its OnCommand portfolio, NetApp now enables customers to better control a clustered data ONTAP environment, driving down storage costs, improving service delivery through open integration, and maximizing investment by providing flexible reporting and cost analysis for IT to C-level executives. Furthermore, the new offerings include advanced analytics and integrated monitoring of capacity, availability, performance, and protection plus automation for a transition to a software-based service delivery model.

NetApp outlined its new and updated patented OnCommand product portfolio,
which includes the following:

• OnCommand Performance Manager: Leveraging powerful analytics, it provides users with automated performance troubleshooting and monitoring of clustered Data ONTAP environments. With large amounts of data moving around dynamically, issues may arise. Performance Manager gives storage administrators the ability to know whether a cluster or volume is experiencing a performance issue and then identifies which resources are impacting volume response times. The limits of ‘normal’ performance are automatically calculated and continually adjusted based on workload patterns. This new insight allows the identification of abnormal behavior and the correlation of events across multiple affected volumes to identify the source of the problem, saving organizations time and money. Performance Manager can be operated from within OnCommand’s Unified Manager or as a standalone application.
• OnCommand Workflow Automation 2.2: It gives users the ability to automate, define, adjust, and schedule storage processes with reduced errors, along with the flexibility to meet the changing needs of a user’s IT infrastructure. Because software scripting expertise is not required, storage professionals can also design highly customized workflows using standard building blocks. A simple portal allows requests to be executed with one-click automation, giving organizations the ability to deliver services more quickly and more efficiently. Workflow Automation integrates with third-party orchestration solutions to provide policy-driven service delivery and it contains more than 50 workflows in its library, including but not limited to provisioning, migrating, and decommissioning storage; setting up a new virtualization environment; setting up storage for an application; setting up the NetApp and Cisco FlexPod platform or virtual desktops; performing storage cloning; automating data protection with NetApp SnapProtect and Snap Creator framework; and conducting a centralized activation of NetApp SnapManager software.
• OnCommand Unified Manager 6.1: Monitoring capacity, availability, performance, and data protection, it provides users with an overarching view of the health of their storage environment. A user-friendly dashboard provides a status report on key metrics and details of multiple NetApp storage systems. Users now have the ability to quickly view whether there are issues – graded critical, error, warning, or information – then prioritize, understand, and troubleshoot them. Enhanced event and alert capabilities further allow IT to manage their clustered Data ONTAP environment proactively.
• OnCommand Insight 7.0: For enterprises and service providers who are required to manage their virtualized and cloud environments, it provides a solution that enables storage cost management, rationalization, and optimization of storage services. In addition, it offers reliable service availability through analysis of storage allocation, chargeback for applications and tenants, performance, and configuration troubleshooting, and it highlights risks to enable infrastructure availability across all major storage vendors and their platforms. Insight 7.0 is enhanced with a new web interface focused on the user experience. It provides a scalable architecture to track small to extremely large environments, delivering visibility into how applications map to their infrastructure and the impact of changes, redundancy, bottlenecks, and workload placement, which better determine utilization and/or further purchasing. Analytics provide accurate cost and usage information along with detailed reports on a customer’s heterogeneous environment. Service providers can leverage the chargeback reports to view each customer; his or her applications; VMs, VM costs, and actual capacity by gigabyte; the type of service; and the service cost.

About OnCommand Portfolio
As IT organizations face numerous challenges – such as data growth, increasing virtualization, and the introduction of private or hybrid cloud environments – companies seek solutions that will help them to meet these challenges. The NetApp OnCommand storage management software portfolio is comprised of a range of products for use with NetApp and multivendor storage, including device-level management, automation and integration, and enterprise SRM.