By Victor Ifediora, Sr. Storage Engineer

The growth of data and the need to manage it is causing new burdens on IT shops. NetApp IT’s deep integration with ONTAP was the first step, but we also need a solution that can help manage the health and performance of ONTAP systems – which NetApp AIQUM (Active IQ Unified Manager) does. 

AIQUM is an AI-driven solution that collects data from ONTAP systems, analyzes that data, and helps companies identify issues, before they become problems. NetApp IT is itself a heavy user of the solution. 

I recently did a full webinar on how we’re using AIQUM to get the most out of our tech stack. 

There, I spoke about how we use AIQUM and the impact it has on the enterprise. 

Storage Management 

AIQUM helps us monitor discover and monitor systems running ONTAP, showing the overall capacity, security, and health of the environment. Enhance alerts and thresholds help ensure ongoing performance and detailed reporting helps plot workload activity. 

NetApp IT Use Case 

We create Service-Level Objective-based provisioning of storage, with intelligent placement and provisioning of storage workloads. 

Performance Monitoring 

AIQUM also monitors the performance of our ONTAP systems and identifies any performance-related issues. It provides real-time insights into storage performance metrics, such as IOPS, latency, and throughput, showing bottlenecks and how to manage them. 

NetApp IT Use Case 

We actively monitor and report on a host of things, including capacity management, performance, data protection, and the FabricPool. We actively identify under- and over-utilized resources and AIQUM helps us balance workloads for optimal performance. 

Data Protection 

Disasters can – and probably will at some point – happen. AIQUM helps ensure the availability and recoverability of their data in case of any disasters or outages. Here, we are able to test recovery plans and proactively prepare for the worst. 

NetApp IT Use Case 

NetApp IT uses AIQUM’s predictive analytics to identify potential issues before they become problems. This includes issues with storage infrastructure, such as failed disks or capacity constraints. From there, we automate actions to resolve issues, such as reallocating data to healthy disks or increasing the size of a volume. 

Workload Optimization   

NetApp IT is constantly looking for new ways to get the most out of our resource spending. Optimizing existing workloads that are over- or under-provisioned goes a long way in doing this. Performance or data protection issues are identified and recommendations for remediation are made, quickly. 

NetApp IT Use Case 

We track performance counters for clusters, nodes, aggregates, ports, support vector machines, volumes, LUNs, NVME namespaces, and network interfaces. This enables us to create and execute on performance threshold standards and act on them when they’re breached. 

AIQUM is a holistic tool that impacts multiple parts of our ecosystem. The comprehensive set of offerings for storage management, capacity planning, performance monitoring, workload optimization, and data protection make it a highly valuable solution that enables us to maximize the value and performance of the tech stack.