Perfonics™: Performance Analysis with Precision
Performance Analysis is required by IT departments to migrate toward a more agile and proactive organization that can guarantee service delivery to the business. At the same time, it helps reduce costs, improve IT efficiency, and shift the focus away from reactive firefighting towards innovating for the business. That is why, Performance Analysis exercises are undertaken by organizations either on a periodic, or on a need-basis!
When Performance Analysis is offered as a service (Performance As A Service™ or PAAS), it provides an unprecedented opportunity for you to effectively manage the performance of your applications and supporting infrastructure. This is because, Perfonics™ knows how to analyze the huge data created by frequent samples of performance data. Minute performance errors in the system can be detected and a corrective action taken for them to be fixed. Perfonics™ enables recurring analysis and baseline comparisons as part of a methodology for performance management and capacity planning that incorporates configuration, capacity and performance data on single page views.
This is what has inspired Interscape to create its Perfonics™ tool which is a comprehensive platform to achieve SLA compliance and reveal areas in your system requiring further or deeper investigation through additional expert analysis.
In-depth information, precise analysis
Interscape’s Perfonics™ service is a highly cost-effective and precise system for analyzing storage network performance. The beauty of the solution lies in that it leverages existing tool set data installed on the customer site without installing any agents or appliances in the existing infrastructure. Further, all analysis can be done offsite which is less disruptive to the business. Using the Perfonics™ Methodology makes it a very painless process for doing Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis for the client.
Perfonics™ offers various levels of flexibility, as well as in-depth information. This creates several sliced and diced views of the storage network as against top-level or generic perspectives. In turn, this adds to the precision with which Storage Managers can detect and monitor errors along with creating predictive plans on utilization of resources.
- Flexible Configuration
To begin with, PAAS offers various subscriptions depending on the features required, the types of storage arrays that will be analyzed, and the upload file size limitations. Trial is a free one-time service provided to first-time clients. The Perfonics™ services can be customized for a small to a very large storage infrastructure that can be a multi-petabyte environment with multi-vendor platforms.
- Filtered and Layered View
A Filter and Layered views is provided in the application reporting where-in the performance analysis information is shown in a very informative filtered basis. This helps IT Managers identify areas of concern, and address them quickly. The reporting can be done in a dashboard fashion or in a very detailed level. This can be viewed by the right decision makers and action initiated accordingly. For example, a IT Engineer can refer to the detailed reports, things like the storage issues at the device level, disk adapter level or front-end level. While a reporting manager can evaluate the Storage Capacity Utilization and critical Performance Issues at a high level. The CTO/CIO may only be interested in things such as Percentage Issues by Platforms and/or Capacity Growth by Data Center.
- Platform specific views
We execute these assessments currently for EMC arrays – VMAX/Symmetrix, Celerra and VNX/CLARiiONss, Hitachi Arrays – USP-V, VSP, IBM Arrays – DS8000, XIV, NetApp Filers, and have a roadmap for extending to other leading Storage arrays. New platforms can be added if needed. We also provide Operating Systems performance analysis for Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP/Ux based servers. This helps the IT department in getting detailed end-to-end views of the storage capacity and performance.
- Modeling, Analysis & Methodology
Perfonics™ based modeling services uses threshold based modeling at each major component level. Thresholds are based on vendor provided best practices limits, and component utilization metrics. Each important metric is stamped as “Critical” or “Warning” based on thresholds configured, which are configured system wide. Each Client is created with a Client ID with multiple projects under a client. Each client can be assigned their own server on the Perfonics™ Cloud to keep their data separated from others. The application cloud can scale up by adding new larger servers as needed at the back-end.
- Drilled down views
The Perfonics™ reports provides various drilled down views that can be used for One time or recurring Performance reviews, Performance troubleshooting, Application IO profiling, Tech refresh consolidation modeling, Migration planning with source to target array and device level mappings, Configuration analysis, Bandwidth analysis, Provisioning script generation, Custom analysis, etc.
- Wide range of Reports
The analysis is provided as PDF reports and summary presentation. There are 50+ reports that can outputs can be selected from and can be high-level dashboard views or very detailed device level views. The raw data is also made available in CSV form from the reporting dashboard or provided as needed. This allows users to do their own what-if type analysis. The reports are again Platform specific and cover all storage points such as Front-End Directors/FAs, Disk Directors/DAs, Remote Adapters, Storage Pools, Disks and Devices.
Perfonics™ tracks the response times of your Storage Area Network and Storage Arrays which directly impact your applications and, business tasks that are critical to your organization. Till date, measuring performance had been a reactive or fire-fighting-on-a-daily-basis approach. It was never a pro-active approach to properly base-lining your applications IO profile using key performance metrics such as IOPS, KBPS, Service Times, IO queues and hardware utilizations. Pro-active baselines of Application IO profiles allow an organization to set intelligent performance thresholds in the operational environments for real-time monitoring.
Perfonics™ based expert inclusive services is a more precise and attractive option as it can help your organization arrive at realistic performance SLA’s based on analysis of actual IO requirements.