Itzikr's Blog

The fourth release of XtremIO is all about scalability, management and matureness, this post covers the management aspects of the array

We started to have many many customers with multiple XtremIO clusters and they loved the XMS concepts but asked if we can have one XMS manage more than one array, version 4.0 delivers that!, a single XMS can now manage multiple clusters and much much more.

Up to 8 clusters are supported in this release. The managed arrays will have to be (NDU) upgraded to version 4.0.

Multi-Cluster MANAGEMENT

Here’s how it looks, you can simply click the array you want to manage / view

..or, you can simply see it in the main console, things like aggregated performance metrics across your datacenter, things like data reduction and more, again, you can view it as an aggregated view or per cluster, this really gives you a good overview of your XtremIO clusters from a centralized management console.

Tags Management

Think about Gmail, it uses tags for easy searching, we have something similar in mind.

It can align storage management with business needs.

For example, you can tag volumes to “production” and “test”, applications, clusters, consistency groups, snapshots sets. Many entities can be tagged.

Ÿ Flexible tagging – Create tags for any object

Ÿ An object can have multiple tags

Ÿ Filter objects using tags for reports or operations

Ÿ Model hierarchy in tags – if folder-like hierarchy is required

Making Use of Tags

You can then of course, filter your results based on the tags you input.

Managing tags

Tags-managed per object type

However, you can create in GUI tag for multiple objects

A tag has the following properties:

Name

Object Type

Hierarchy (default is root)

Color

Read-only and up user role

Associating tags to objects

XtremIO 4.0 Reporting

Two years historical data for Cluster & Objects

GUI/CLI/REST interfaces to access historical data

Multi-cluster reporting

Security – Reports for a single user or publicly available for all users

Tagging support

Report templates

Ÿ Pre-loaded reports for common queries

Ÿ Use templates as the basis for new report

What can you do with reports?

Provide both real-time & historical data

Stores up to 2 years with variable granularity

Support reporting at different desired levels: Cluster, volumes, IGs, Group of objects etc.

Aggregate objects based on business needs (using tags)

Multiple modes of data access

– Online GUI, printed report, png/csv files

– APIs are available to consume data programmatically

 Key Benefits
Provides better visibility of cluster performance and capacity usage over time

Use cases

– Better planning and monitoring

– Trend analysis of performance and capacity

– SLA tracking

– ROI and TCO performance

– Forensics/analytics of performance issues

– Analysis of a single application workload or consolidated workloads

What’s New IN Version 4.0?

Ÿ What did we have in Version 3.0?

– Real-time monitoring data of Clusters & Objects

– GUI based real-time monitor generation

– Limited historical data (7 days of cluster-level performance data)

Ÿ What NEW in version 4.0?

– 2 years historical data for Cluster & Objects

– GUI/CLI/REST interfaces to access historical data

– Cluster-level capacity tracking

– Multi-cluster reporting

– Improved security – Enable reports for a user or make it publicly available for all cluster users

Reports data: Avg, Max, Min time aggregations

Average, Maximum and Minimum historical data values are calculated for the different time aggregation units

Default is Average

Reports Definition

Public/Private reports

Public/private reports

– Private reports are visible only to the user that created the report

– Public reports are visible to all users; editable only to the user who created the report

– By default all reports are Private

– Reports names do not have to be unique

Reports time definition

Time definitions:

– Real-time (real-time monitoring data display; like in version 3.0)

– Last hour (60 min); Last day (24 hours); Last week (7 days); Last year (365 days)

– Custom time – any From date-time to any To date-time