IOportal Proactive Service for VSP 5000 - optimise through transparency
The IOportal Proactive Service has been assisting Hitachi Enterprise storage systems customers to get the most out of their arrays for years. Based on the IOportal Cloud Service, it offers customers wide-ranging support to facilitate the daily work but also to facilitate recurring tasks that impose additional workload. The periodic Health Checks, part of the Proactive Service, are based on a set of graphs specifically designed for this purpose, focussing on long term trends and slow creeping performance degradations. The graphs together with expert’s comments are compiled in the health check report, which is presented and discussed preferably face-to-face on customer premises, or otherwise remotely. The goal of the service is to identify and mitigate resource constraints/bottlenecks/saturation before they impact application performance and/or increase operational risk. The customer benefits from improved and stabilised I/O performance during the life-cycle of his systems, reduced operational risk and increased IT efficiency through optimised used of the available resources.
Our latest upgrade to the Health Checks service focuses on the novel architecture of VSP 5000 systems. The latest high-end systems from Hitachi come in different configurations, VSP 5100/5200, VSP 5500/5600 2N, 4N and 6N, and facilitate IO traffic between nodes via the novel Hitachi Accelerated Fabric. The departure from the crossbar architecture of older high-end systems comes with new chances as well as challenges.
Operating and optimising VSP 5000 systems requires understanding how
the load is distributed amongst different CBX Pairs and controllers, as well
as how the resources of different CBX Pairs and controllers are utilised.
The new architecture suggests that different path configurations experience
different latencies and, hence, understanding the potential front-end cross and
front-end straight scenarios becomes important to those customers that
strive for the best performance in the most challenging environments.
The new peaq analysis tools take up the challenge and decompose all relevant KPIs in the respective CBX Pairs (or controller failover pairs), thus offering a transparent view of the VSP 5000 internals. The multitude of graphs that are specifically developed for the Health Check service are adapted to account for this new decomposition and offer a deeper understanding of the system operation. Automated tools analyse the configuration paths of all volumes and all servers, thus identifying the exact extent of front-end cross I/Os, as well as those cases where optimisation is possible, recommended or even required. With these new tools in our health check arsenal, the customer gets a deeper understanding of his operations, while peaq can offer fine-grained improvement suggestions for optimising performance, reducing operational risk and increasing IT efficiency.
The new capabilities of the Health Check Service, akin to an fMRI image of VSP 5000 systems, enable our customers to truly get the most out of their Hitachi Enterprise Storage investment, even more so with VSP 5000 systems!
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