https://vimeo.com/277628276

The Devil is in the Details

This year, I was quite proud to be named part of the #NetAppUnited crew for the second time. Thanks to Petya Stefanova (@PeytStevanova) and her awesome crew for acknowledging me with this honor. As such, I approached the briefing James Holden presented for Storage Field Day 16 with a really fresh eye.

OCI, or OnCommand Insight, is a very interesting approach toward the monitoring and troubleshooting of your NetApp environment. There are some differentiations here as opposed to, for example, InfoSight from HPE, in a number of ways. Where the HPE model aggregates the data from the entire ecosystem of Nimble or 3Par customers who’ve enabled these abilities, then compares your environment against the rest of the world using a cloud-based database, NetApp keeps all information on-premises, actually holding on to 90 days of full data. This data then becomes less detailed over time.

With a fully programmable Restful API, OCI also offers full integration with ServiceNow, on the CMDB, as well as chargeback, orchestration, and ticketing. This is a very powerful key component to the strategy an organization may hold to the function of ticketing trouble calls, supporting the environment, and mitigating the potential issues far more aggressively than standard procedures may imply.

Licensing of the OCI platform is determined by raw (unformatted) disc capacity in Terabytes.

I can see many categories in which the model will streamline the functionality of a helpdesk. As an aside, my company, Connection Enterprise is a large partner of ServiceNow, offering a managed services model. I think that as the industry standard, fully fleshed out help desk, cmdb, trouble ticket package, ServiceNow does play a huge role both in the OCI platform, and for Connection in our goals of assisting our customer’s IT organization to run more smoothly.

This brings us to “Cloud Insights,” sort of the next iteration, but with a slightly different focus. The fact is, that most environments today have some component of cloud as a part of them. The idea is that with some level of analytics, a customer may be more equipped to determine where, in the cloud, their applications may best reside, reducing the costs associated with cloud applications, and both reactively and proactively prevent any issues, or reduce the amount of time to mitigating issues that arise.

With a large and expanding portfolio of third party collectors in place, including AWS, Dell/EMC, HPE, IBM Softlayer, Openstack, Oracle, etc. and with more coming, to build a full ecosystem of plugins. A customer can feel reasonably confident that by putting their faith in Cloud Insights to help to guide them, remediate for them, and help to manage their infrastructure, they can safely manage a fully fleshed out cloud architecture.

As with all the stellar presentations seen at Storage Field Day 16, I am finding that the devil’s in the details, and with full insight to those details, we can best be prepared to tame that devil.