Healthy (Storage) Habits for the New Year
Rip Wilson
For a lot of us, New Year’s resolutions include health and fitness. Exercise: walk, ride a bike, jump rope, or lift weights, get that heart rate up every day. Eat healthy: less red meat, more fruits and veggies, and no more ice cream for breakfast. (Well, let’s not get carried away.) These well-intentioned plans, however, often go awry by the end of January.
This year, how about making a New Year’s resolution you can keep? Focus on your storage health. Make sure your systems are in tip-top shape. NetApp® Active IQ® Digital Advisor is there to help.
Active IQ simplifies the proactive care and optimization of your storage. It uses AIOps to uncover risk factors and recommend actions to improve system availability, security, and performance.
The result? Healthy storage. New Year’s resolution kept. Here’s how it works.
Actionable intelligence
Every day, Active IQ receives telemetry data from hundreds of thousands of systems around the globe, adding to a multipetabyte data lake that processes trillions of data points every month. With a massive installed base supporting diverse use cases, Active IQ has a super-rich set of data for AIOps.Active IQ continuously assesses this data, using predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to uncover risk factors and opportunities to improve system health, availability, and security. When a potential issue is identified, Active IQ can take immediate action or provide guidance to remediate a risk or optimize a configuration.
Proactive care and optimization
Benjamin Franklin said it best: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Active IQ can help you get ahead of potential problems before they become actual problems that impact your business.Active IQ is always on the lookout for misconfigurations, security vulnerabilities, outdated firmware, failing hardware, and other risk factors. It keeps an eye on systems that are reaching performance or capacity limits due to unexpected or rapid growth. Anything that might jeopardize system availability, security, or performance receives attention and action.
If you want to be even more proactive, Active IQ can show you how well your systems align with known performance indicators. The new health check assessment provides categorized health scores, analysis of your environment, and recommendations for improving system uptime, performance, and security.
Upgrade with confidence
One of the easiest ways to achieve healthy storage is to be sure that your code is current. Upgrades fix bugs, increase resiliency, eliminate security vulnerabilities, introduce new features, and improve overall performance. Active IQ makes sure that upgrades go smoothly. It makes recommendations, highlights benefits, checks interoperability, and provides all the steps in the upgrade process. Firmware updates are even easier with Ansible playbooks that fully automate the process.
Simplified storage operations
Like any good advisor, Active IQ keeps you informed and highly efficient. It provides constant visibility into the health of your environment, lets you know when attention is required, and gives you clear guidance for any actions you need to take. This could be an automated firmware update, or the steps to remediate a risk, optimize a configuration, or prepare for an upgrade. 90% of customers say that Active IQ saves them at least a couple of hours of admin time every week.
We all have a preferred way of communication, so Active IQ provides its alerts, insights, and guidance in the format that works best for you. There’s a web UI for full-featured visibility into system health, best next actions, upgrades, and more. The Active IQ mobile app keeps you informed when you’re on the go. API services and Ansible playbooks allow you to programmatically integrate Active IQ recommendations directly into your DevOps or change-management workflows. You can also find Active IQ alerts and guidance in NetApp Cloud Manager, NetApp Cloud Insights, and Active IQ Unified Manager.
Simple, intelligent storage health with Active IQ
Being proactive about storage health is smart. Finding time for it is another story. Active IQ makes it easy to keep that New Year’s resolution and achieve optimal storage health.Active IQ is available to all NetApp customers who have an active support contract (features vary by product and support tier). If you already have an SSO, you can log in and get started now. Or visit the Active IQ page to learn more.
Rip Wilson
Rip Wilson is a principal product marketing manager at NetApp with over 20 years of experience developing compelling messaging and content that communicates our unique business value. Rip holds a degree in business management from Georgia Tech. He is based in Colorado and enjoys golf, tennis, and poker.
