This week I'd like to thank one of our competitors...Dell/EqualLogic.    You may find it odd for a storage vendor to compliment a fellow competitor but hey you have to give credit where credit is due.   Healthy competition stimulates the marketplace and ensures the end products are better tools that address customer needs.  I'm a big Mac OSX fan... I like the style... the interface... it's just so simple to use in comparison to Windows, yet looking at the new beta version of Windows 7, it looks like Microsoft have really raised their game and developed an interface that looks possibly at parity with OSX.  Apples presence in the marketplace has improved Microsofts products so everyone gets a better product,  I saw a similar behaviour when Lexus burst onto the scene in the early 90's, BMW, Mercedes and Audi all had to raise their game;

FilerView has for a long time been the NetApp device manager - a simple web-based GUI that let's you simply administer a NetApp Storage System.  When I first used FilerView the other tools I had the joy of using was EMC Control Center (and the dreaded bin-file changes) and SANWorks/Steam agent for Compaq RA8000 controllers;  FilerView was a breeze of fresh-air in comparison;  The trouble with FilerView was it was like a comfortable pair of old slippers, it just remained there - still used and trusty but gradually becoming old and stale, whilst the world outside moved on;   One thing I hear consistently from Dell/EqualLogic customers is they have a really nice device manager - it's simply to use, efificient and you can setup a controller in 20 minutes is often a claim (once it's racked and powered of course). I've even heard of the odd Systems Engineer run up an ONTAP simulator to show comparisons between FilerView and their interface... Suddenly there was a new kid on the block and they had a sexy interface;  The management bar was raised and just like Microsoft we had to move on to remain competitive.

Today we annouced NetApp System Manager. NetApp System Manager is a simple to use client interface, it's not really a replacement to FilerView as FilerView still remains (so if you like those comfortable slippers then keep wearing them) but when your ready to test it, download it (or fire up the CD) and start using it (it's free by the way)... NetApp System Manager's raison d'être is to simplify the common storage management tasks from Discovery and Setting up the controller, after it's powered on, to the ongoing management tasks like creation/expansion of LUN's, mapping to FC/iSCSI target, create a CIFS share or a NFS Export, take a snapshot/clone, run deduplication on a primary volume or provision a new datastore for my virtual infrastructure.  All of these workflows are managed from a simple to use interface;

NetApp System Manager runs as a client application on the desktop (it's a MMC plug-in) so naturally everything is pretty simple, point and click.. right click and wizards to guide you through the common workflows.  To give you some idea of the speed of setup -  I performed an installation, discovery and configuration of a new NetApp controller from power-up to up serving data to a virtual environment in 8 mins - don't believe me then see it for yourself setup  and provision....  Better still try it for yourself and download the release for free from NOW;  As it completely co-exists with FilerView and Command-Line Interface feel free to test it and adopt it when your ready;

So thanks Dell/EqualLogic for making our products better !

Usually the first question for many administrator is understanding “What have I got ?” which is quickly followed by “How is it being utilized?” and then an overwhelming need to understand “When will I need some more ?  or When will it run out ?”;   This has traditionally been managed purely on a capacity basis however the need to understand the performance characteristics is equally if not more important.
 
Data ONTAP provides basic functionality to provide this information from a capacity perspective (df/FilerView) to performance (sysstat/perfstat) however managing this on an individual system basis across multiple controllers doesn’t really scale and is not the best use of an administrators time.  Many environments would rather alert and manage by exception as opposed to employing someone to continually look for potential issues and misconfigurations (which ultimately doesn’t scale);    Operations Manager was once described to me by a customer as “the one truth of our Enterprise rollout of Data ONTAP”;    First and foremost it understands and manages ONTAP regardless of whether the infrastructure is a FAS or a V-Series, F-825 or FAS6070;    Once discovered it provides management in four key areas:
  
Discovery – Operations Manager can be configured to automatically discover devices that sit on a range of subnets,  alternatively this discovery can be limited to only discovering devices when an administrator adds them manually;    Once known to Operations Manager that system will be polled and it’s data collected,  any changes to the controller (New disks, aggregates, volumes, qtrees) are automatically discovered and collected;  
 
Reporting – As the data is collected it is held is a centralized repository (a relational database) where we can start to collate and create a wide range of reports (Capacity Utilization, Performance, Chargeback or Controller configuration) across a variety of objects (Disks/FlexVols/Aggregates/Systems to collection of devices across business units, geography or the entire Enterprise);    As this data is collected a variety of reports can be run to ascertain historic trends and future projections;   The reporting functions provide great insights into assets which are highly utilized but also assets that are under-utilized and potential candidates for reclamation and chargeback reporting
 
Alerting – As controllers are polled, alerts are generated based on break/fix errors but also for Capacity/Threshold violations or Expected growth (based on the historic trend previously observed);  The alerts can either be consolidated and managed through Operations Manager or passed through to a 3rd party Management framework (eg, HP OpenView / BMC Patrol / Netcool)
 
ONTAP Configuration Management – You wouldn’t use Operations Manager to explicitly create a new volume or expand an aggregate,  however there are certain management tasks that I want to run from a centralized point for administration ease;  Password management for instance, I may have a directive where every ONTAP login password needs to be changed – without Operations Manager I would login to every Storage Systems and manually rollout the change;  With Operations Manager I can make the change in one place and then go and push the change out to a single, subset or all the controllers;  

Integral to the Operations Manager core license is Performance Advisor.  Performance Advisor provides unrivalled performance monitoring by collecting data from Data ONTAP’s counter manager which provides much more granular statistics than conventional SNMP polling;  Performance Advisor provides a graphical user interface to query the historic data so that trends can be seen and the current performance can be historically compared;  Such visibility is great for reactive monitoring and troubleshooting but probably more powerful is the ability to create thresholds to monitor for Performance violations so that trends or sustained activity can be measured, tracked, alerted and monitored proactively allowing an administrator to assess how much performance is available before continually adding workloads, in the hope that the control will just cope;

You wouldn’t drive a car whilst covering up the speedometer so why would you deploy your storage controllers without having visibility of their utilization and performance ?