Data Management at Scale with NetApp Service Level Manager
Vishwas V
Management simplicity and operation efficiency constitute the top demand for large enterprise management today. As workload data becomes more diverse, storage needs have become more complex. Yet, the goal is to simplify to reduce cost and increase efficiency.
The problem of complexity needs to be addressed in a way that doesn’t feel complex. Instead, technology should manage the complexity for you. And that is exactly the challenge NetApp tackled with NetApp® Service Level Manager software.
NetApp Service Level Manager (SLM) is a new product that is new industry leading product. SLM provides a kind of automation platform for delivering storage as a service (StaaS) for on-premises deployment and enables you to become an on-premises cloud storage service provider. SLM software has an automation engine that provides intelligent provisioning and workload management. It also radically simplifies storage automation at scale through a service-centric, RESTful interface. Uniquely, you get a balance of performance, service agility, and cost in a single place.
With SLM, the administrator or architect defines storage service level classes that reflect the combinations of performance and capacity that exist in their IT environment.
The following SLM dashboard shows information for all the workloads and a complete view of the data center’s available space and performance.
Automation architects can perform all the necessary tasks for service level management, such as defining service level classes, in addition to configuring and managing NetApp ONTAP®, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and NetApp OnCommand® Unified Manager instances.
After the storage service level classes have gone through a one-time setup, administrators can easily provision storage by specifying how much storage capacity is needed, and from which storage service level class, and they are done. It’s that simple.
In fact, it is so simple that you can even allow operators with minimal training to deploy storage capacity repeatedly and predictably as needed—knowing that company standards have been met for price/performance.
NetApp Service Level Manager ships with rich set of features which spans across multiple areas. Achievements towards management simplicity, automation scale, Zero touch provisioning can be summarized as follows across the following discipline,
- Extreme ease of use, with minimal training
- Radically simplify the provisioning of capacity and performance even at scale, in large environments
- Management of storage and data with service level objectives (SLOs)
- Automate, monitor, and regulate activities to systematically meet storage SLOs that are mapped to SLAs.
- Compliance through a central service catalog
- Demonstrate compliance with company standards using predefined or custom policies to provision capacity and performance on a consistent basis
- Automatic discovery
- Quickly discover the capabilities of your NetApp storage, and automatically map it into pools of service levels.
- Intelligent, automated provisioning
- Simply state your objectives, and SLM automatically deploys capacity in the right place, with the right configuration, based on analytics that understand the capabilities of your NetApp storage.
- More predictable and efficient provisioning
- Meet your storage service levels from the very beginning without resorting to unnecessary and inefficient overprovisioning
- Automatic monitoring and adaptation to workload changes
- Monitor and adjust the number of IOPS available by scaling throughput limits as your requirements grow, to deliver a reliable, predictable experience for application users
Improve Operations with Predictable Capacity and Performance
NetApp Service Level Manager completely changes storage and service level management—simultaneously increasing ease of use, ease of scale, and general reliability, predictability, and consistency of storage services. Things are always done right the first time—and every time.SLM improves cost and efficiencies in other ways as well. Using NetApp’s analytics and automation to provision performance and capacity correctly from the start means a reduction in unexpected issues or outages down the road. So, administrators can reduce the time and cost spent in troubleshooting and remediating problems. And with SLM’s SLO conformance monitoring, you can easily track how you are delivering against your SLOs, which allows you to take proactive steps to avoid or eliminate trouble.
Finally, NetApp Service Level Manager functionality is exposed as REST APIs to enable highly integrated, highly automated data center operations. For example, SLM-based storage provisioning can be integrated with custom-developed, third-party orchestrators or IT service desk products to coordinate the provisioning of storage with other resources, such as servers or virtual machines.
If you’re looking for the most efficient and effective way to scale the management of your storage, put NetApp Service Level Manager at the top of your list.
Listen to these two NetApp Tech ONTAP® podcasts to learn more about storage service design. And be sure to check back in to read our next blog post, where we’ll take a closer look at how NetApp Service Level Manager makes storage management easy.
For more information about NetApp Service Level Manager 1.2RC1, see the Release Notes.
Vishwas V
Vishwas is a Manager in Product Management Group for Manageability Products . He is with NetApp for over ten years and has deep understanding of the IT Management, Security and Storage industries. Prior to NetApp, Vishwas has worked with large corporations like Dell EMC, HP to name a few.
