Airline companies do it; automobile companies do it; even manufacturing companies do it. They and others deploy sophisticated tools that regularly collect data from cars, tires, planes, machines, widgets, etc. to monitor for performance and anomalies (irregularities) – before they ever come to market to be safely and efficiently used by all of us. Suppose your child has always performed well in school and then suddenly the grades go lower for some unforeseen reason. This is a form of performance anomaly. Something has distracted the child that should be identified and resolved so the child can get back onto a track of sustained performance excellence. There are many examples that we can cite and examine. Anomalies occur everywhere – across industries, products, services, and even in human situations. Identifying where and why anomalous situations occur improves overall operational effectiveness, personal safety, and even how we behave and learn.
So why wouldn’t you want to see performance statistics and anomalies across your primary storage systems responsible for running important business applications. Just what I thought – of course you’d want to see this information. Let me introduce you to CloudIQ, a no cost cloud-based storage analytics application that, in part, detects storage performance anomalies across all your Dell EMC Unity and UnityVSA storage. With this non-intrusive capability, storage administrators won’t need to chase down non-issues or conversely have to deal with the aftermath associated with unanticipated impacts to storage performance or worse – application downtime.
Cloud-based storage analytics
Many companies take steps to reduce risk in their business. No IT professional can predict when or how a bottleneck in storage performance will occur and the effect it can have on overall system performance. CloudIQ proactively monitors and measures the overall health of an unlimited number of Dell EMC Unity storage systems through intelligent, comprehensive, and predictive analytics. It’s these context-aware insights backed by extensive telemetry data that help you ensure stringent application performance requirements are being met while proactively differentiating standard and “normal” spikes in performance from atypical adverse behaviors, and providing potential root causes and remediation for the latter. CloudIQ dynamically compares the behavior of each Dell EMC Unity storage array against the “norms” while looking for anomalies that could indicate potential problems. This seamless approach ensures that real performance problems are distinguished from routine performance spikes, so that storage admins can filter out the transitory occurrences (false alarms) to avoid wasting time pursuing non-issues.
Let’s say you’re running a 1000 desktop VDI environment on your Dell EMC Unity All-Flash storage system. When you access CloudIQ with your favorite browser, you notice a performance spike in IOPS that occurs every morning between 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Using CloudIQ, an IT professional would be able to conclude this spike as being a consistent performance pattern likely due to massive user boot up or login storm activity and let it go. But let’s say you access CloudIQ and you notice an erratic display of performance spikes (this time outside the normal range) over an extended period of time. With CloudIQ you’d be able to rapidly determine a potential database query that’s run wild as a large user base tries to access application data, thus seriously impacting IO and latency.
Regardless of industry or company size, IT organizations are under more pressure to deliver exceptional business performance than ever. Confronted with the rise of Big Data, mobile, cloud, and the Internet of Things – IT is challenged to gain the infrastructure visibility they need to detect anomalies in advance and take action. CloudIQ optimizes your insight into performance and root causes across Dell EMC Unity and UnityVSA Professional Edition storage with proactive health scores for each connected array.
Now if we can just get a version of CloudIQ for monitoring homework assignments!