Proactive Risk Management with Active IQ

I will start with an admission. I used to manage the largest supercomputer that was available at the time—the bleeding edge of technology in its day. This machine, although extremely fast at scalar and floating-point operations, was a nightmare to manage. When it worked, all was well. But when it broke, it meant many hours on the phone or in the data center to troubleshoot, usually at the most inconvenient time.

Back then, very little intelligence came from a system to give the tired staff any clue about its general heath. If you wanted something, you wrote it yourself, usually by analyzing reams of syslog output. Activities such as capacity planning and performance management were similarly challenging. You had to understand the heartbeat of those beasts, but the outcome was pretty much driven by reacting to events.

Fast-forward a few years: Now I find myself looking at the evolution of system, service, and risk management—Active IQ. If you have an active NetApp support contract, you have access to Active IQ, no expensive third-party products are required. But what does it give you?

If you enable Active IQ, NetApp can collect health and configuration telemetry from your system. Many customers take advantage of this opportunity, and some 300,000 systems worldwide provide this data. The collected data forms a lake of 200 billion data points—over 4PB in size. Telemetry data can be collected from all NetApp data management systems and software, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud infrastructure, scale-out architectures, and object systems.