Easily Manage Your Data Across a Multicloud Environment with Active IQ and Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Laurence James
This blog post is part 2 of my discussion on Active IQ. For background, read part 1.
This year’s early technology predictions have all had one consistent point: forecasting growth in the adoption of multicloud. Many organizations have invested in cloud for the speed, automation, flexibility, and elasticity that it brings. However, the cloud still presents the challenges of operational visibility and management of risk. I have spent years working with operations across multiple systems in different locations, and I quickly learned that consistent control, management, and data planes are highly desirable features. The same is true for cloud, and the same rules apply for data movement, protection, duplication, and security, as applied in a brick-and-mortar data center. Across the edge, the core, and the cloud, people want a consistent, repeatable, predictable set of functions and rules that follow an operation however it changes over time.
Here’s some good news: Active IQ supports cloud operations. If you’re running NetApp Cloud Volumes in AWS or in Azure, you can capture the telemetry and use Active IQ to display analytics and insights for your operations in the cloud. My mantra has always been, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Active IQ gives you this capability across the edge, the core, and the cloud.
If you have a multivendor, multicloud operation, the challenges increase, but you can complement Active IQ with NetApp Cloud Insights to overcome those challenges. By using Cloud Insights, you can quickly achieve full stack monitoring. Now my mantra applies: “You can measure it, and you can manage it from anywhere.”
Several other “big-ticket” features are worthy of deeper investigation. For example, with Active IQ, you get a unified dashboard with a single view of your entire operation, including:
- Heath status (capacity, performance, upgrade options, and community wisdom)
- A range of advisory tools (storage efficiency, Flash Advisor, Risk Advisor, expansion requestor, and configuration comparison and drift)
- Workload functions (tagging, efficiency and capacity, and cloud-enabled)
Support, planning, and operations teams are often away from their normal place of work, but they need to be in contact and in control. NetApp considered this situation and produced a comprehensive Active IQ mobile app (for iOS and for Android), which is also voice-activated. This app brings system health information to the people who need it and who can act on it regardless of where they might be.
Active IQ mobile app[/caption]
I wish that I had had access to this depth of intelligence back when I was working on supercomputers. My hair might not be so gray today if I had! Managing risk, in the context of customer satisfaction, remains a high priority for many organizations. It’s so easy to lose track of things through unplanned outages or poor system performance, but these days, such outcomes are unforgivable.
If you have an active support contract with NetApp, then getting the value from Active IQ through regular use can help you gain the competitive advantage that you need.
If you’re looking for reliable and comprehensive visibility of your operations across the edge, the core, and the cloud, Active IQ is just what you need to build out your service. When it comes to providing extensive coverage and data-driven insight, I can find nothing else like Active IQ in the industry.
To get started, learn more about how Active IQ works:
Laurence James
Laurence is responsible for driving market awareness for NetApp’s products across EMEA. His focus is on business growth and aligning NetApp’s offerings with customer and market needs. Laurence works across all of NetApp’s products and has an in-depth understanding of diverse customer requirements to deliver value across the entire range of the product suite. Working with a dedicated and experienced team, he now assists in developing and implementing campaigns that support the positioning of NetApp’s Cloud Infrastructure products. Laurence has many years’ experience working with all aspects of Enterprise IT and held roles at Oracle, Sun Microsystems and StorageTek. For nearly 20 years he was Principal IT Consultant at the UK Meteorological Office.
