Building the future of SAN management

SANs are the bedrock of mission-critical workloads. They are powerful, reliable, and get the job done. Yet many IT teams operate with an "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality.

Why? Because the perceived risk of making changes often outweighs the potential benefits. The complexity of SAN environments means that even minor issues can snowball, and tech refreshes feel like massive, disruptive projects.

Despite these challenges, SAN is here to stay, with analysts predicting its continued growth well beyond 2035. Now is the time to focus on how you can reduce risk, simplify troubleshooting, and empower your entire IT operations team.

By leveraging AIOps and taking a proactive approach, you can transform SAN management or refreshes from a source of stress into a streamlined, efficient process.

Managing a SAN environment keeps storage administrators on their toes with a unique set of challenges. Responding to inevitable issues is difficult when deep SAN expertise is limited, leading to prolonged downtime and increased mean time to resolution (MTTR). Knowledge is often siloed, creating bottlenecks during critical incidents and complicating stakeholder coordination. Furthermore, even if modern platforms like NetApp^® ASA can alleviate transition challenges, SAN refresh projects are historically perceived as notoriously long and disruptive, making organizations hesitant to adopt new technology and leaving them with aging infrastructure that is prone to failure. These operational realities demand a smarter, more intuitive SAN management approach that democratizes knowledge and provides actionable insights for the entire team.

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights is designed to simplify the management and operations of your block storage. It provides a centralized platform for infrastructure monitoring and observability, enabling you to move beyond basic maintenance and into the realm of smart AIOps, taking advantage of AI-powered insights for resource planning, anomaly detection, and streamlined troubleshooting.

One of the biggest hurdles in troubleshooting block workloads is the lack of a clear, end-to-end view. Data Infrastructure Insights breaks down these silos with its SAN Analyzer feature, offering complete VM-to-LUN visibility.

Imagine being able to see the entire data path for your workloads in a single, intuitive topology map. This feature works across heterogeneous storage and compute environments, supporting both Fibre Channel and IP SAN. You can overlay performance metrics, alerts, and events directly onto the topology, providing crucial context for troubleshooting. This process makes it straightforward for all ITOps stakeholders—not just SAN specialists—to understand performance issues and identify the root cause of problems quickly.

Data Infrastructure Insights uses AIOps-powered anomaly detection to make this ability a reality. Its self-learning algorithm continuously analyzes metrics across your infrastructure, understanding seasonal patterns and adapting to trends. It learns what "normal" looks like for your unique environment.

This powerful capability can be applied to any metric on any device. For example, you can monitor for:

• Storage performance saturation
• SAN port throughput deviations
• Spikes in SAN error counts
• Anomalies in SFP power utilization

By detecting these performance or error anomalies early, you can take proactive steps to resolve them, efficiently preventing service disruptions and minimizing downtime. Your team shifts from a reactive stance to a proactive one, saving valuable time and resources.

Change is the leading cause of IT incidents. A seemingly minor configuration update can have unforeseen consequences across the data path. Data Infrastructure Insights provides powerful Infrastructure Change Analysis to help you connect the dots.

The platform continuously monitors the topology and configuration of your entire infrastructure, automatically detecting any changes. It then correlates these changes with related assets and alerts, showing you the direct impact on critical SAN components. This is invaluable for two key scenarios:

• Operations. When an issue arises, you can quickly determine whether a recent change was the cause, dramatically accelerating root cause analysis.
• Migrations, Throughout a SAN refresh project, you can use change analysis to reduce risk by validating each step so that everything performs as expected.

This feature also includes workload contention analysis, giving you a clear path for follow-up troubleshooting so that your infrastructure remains stable and performant.

To navigate the complexities of modern IT, you need tools that offer clarity and control. Here’s what to remember:

• Build on a strong foundation. NetApp has a long history of providing best-in-class manageability for block storage. Data Infrastructure Insights continues this legacy, empowering you to handle even the most demanding environments.
• Bridge the skills gap. The scarcity of advanced SAN skills is a recognized industry challenge. Data Infrastructure Insights democratizes SAN management with intuitive, AIOps-powered tools that make everyone on your team a storage expert.
• Reduce alert fatigue. Consolidate your monitoring efforts and gain clear, correlated insights. By leveraging AIOps, you can reduce tool sprawl and focus on the alerts that truly matter, improving your MTTR and overall operational efficiency.

Ready to embrace a more intelligent, proactive approach to SAN management? With Data Infrastructure Insights, you can reduce risk, streamline troubleshooting, and optimize your entire block storage environment. Request a free 30-day trial to try it out in your own environment.