We hope that by now, you’ve read the announcement about the new and enhanced VNX-F All Flash Array and that its’ captured your interest and attention. And if so, then you may be wondering, is there more to the VNX-F than being purpose-built for price, density, and speed. And the answer is – of course there is. Beyond being EMC’s lowest price all flash arrays with incredible density – there’s also some important management capabilities that I’d like to cover here that everyone gets with every VNX-F.
EMC Monitoring and Reporting (M&R)
We know our customers look for and need simple and centralized ways to monitor storage capacity, utilization, and performance – but obtaining and organizing all this information can be difficult without the right tools. Unisphere Monitoring & Reporting (M&R) is an agent-less software solution that addresses these needs on the VNX-F with a simple and centralized tool for viewing capacity and analyzing performance that proves storage is not the root cause of response time complaints and provides trending and forecasting growth helping to justify upgrades. M&R automatically collects VNX-F block statistics enabling automated data aggregation for report acceleration. And then using the M&R secure Web Portal dashboard, VNX-F admins can easily manage user roles, monitor the health of a VNX-F, access reports quickly and effectively via the navigation tree, search engine, global views, and drill-down facilities, and retrieve information from one or several VNX-F systems –and include any VNX hybrid arrays that may also be in the environment.
The dashboard is a flexible way to improve VNX-F storage efficiency by helping admins troubleshoot and manage the performance and capacity of their VNX-F systems. Installation is a breeze (taking less than 5 minutes) and the application is entirely HTML so there are no plug-in requirements.
EMC Quality of Service Manager (QoS Manager)
When it comes to your most critical application environments, nothing is more important than being able to ensure that consistent performance levels (a critical capability, especially in service provider environments) are being delivered to virtualized applications and workloads – even when it’s an all flash storage system. EMC QoS Manager is a software product that’s integrated seamlessly with the Unisphere web-based management interface to let you centrally and dynamically manage and allocate storage-system resources to meet your application service level requirements including response time, bandwidth, and throughput – with no host footprint. Essentially, QoS Manager allows you to prioritize applications (should you want to run multiple workloads on the VNX-F) and set specific performance service level targets per application. QoS Manager is capable of allocating and monitoring VNX-F system performance resources on an application-by-application (you can actually look at multiple metrics in parallel) basis helping to discover bottlenecks. For the admin, this helps provide a way to control and meet their application IO service level requirements (LUN by LUN; I/O Type Read or Write; and I/O Size) in environments where multiple applications may share the same VNX-F storage resources. All the VNX-F performance data that’s gathered by QoS Manager is presented in simple and clear charts describing application performance analysis and trending. In addition to displaying real-time data, QoS Manager allows you to archive performance data for offline trending and analysis.
Sure, the VNX-F is purpose-built for price, density, and speed. But with management software like Quality of Service Manager and Monitoring and Reporting – that come standard with the Unisphere Management Suite – it’s never been quicker or easier to see the performance and capacity details of your VNX-F all flash storage. The story doesn’t end here. In a future blog, I’ll tell you what other management options there are to enhance your VNX-F experience.