NetApp Storage Performance Efficiency Monitoring and Reporting System

NetApp is a hybrid cloud-based data manager to keep track of your applications and inter-computer information. A NetApp storage system can take many different forms—including hardware flash storage enabling computers to back up their data, cloud-based storage enabling data collection and transmission across applications and machines, and hybrid cloud systems like private clouds and VMware to virtualize storage while keeping it specific to a single user. 

NetApp is one of many companies specialized in data storage technology. Other common storage solutions include EMC, Nimble, and Infinidat. NetApp is widely used across many industries and offers a diverse set of products, so business may end up needing NetApp storage monitoring to ensure these products function as intended.

NetApp storage systems include a wide variety of software and hardware for data storage capacity on a network, divided into three main categories: 

1. Storage Area Networks (SANs) – SAN software can implement virtual storage on a large scale, processing information from various applications transmitted across machines and VMs, applications such as Oracle, VMware, and SQL Server.
2. FlexArray storage virtualization – FlexArray provides a software by which data storage pools can expand past their normal machine capacity in a secure, ONTAP-protected environment.
3. Disk shelves/storage media – NetApp also offers disk shelves and storage media, hardware units designed for increased data storage and streamlined transmission. 

Many different NetApp storage components can coexist within one machine or VM, which is why NetApp storage is referred to as a system. Within this system, solutions like SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor can be used to monitor NetApp devices and help increase storage efficiency when large amounts of data are introduced or complex transfer mechanisms are slowing down the data storage process.

NetApp storage efficiency is the ability of NetApp storage arrays to perform tasks accurately and reliably. NetApp storage can be an integral component of a server’s data storage infrastructure. However, there are occasionaly inefficiencies in data processing with NetApp devices, inclduing I/O information reaching a bottleneck while entering a machine, exceeding data capacity and causing an outage, or unplanned downtime causing your NetApp system to run idle. 

NetApp storage efficiency can be improved using software to help address these concerns by identifying capacity issues, alerting the system when downtime is creating unnecessary idleness, or observing system metrics to identify potential bottlenecks in your I/O processes before they happen. NetApp products do their job best when the right measures are taken to not exceed storage limits. A comprehensive monitoring system can go a long way in improving the efficiency and operability of your NetApp storage system.

NetApp storage monitoring software is used alongside NetApp storage systems to help ensure the systems are running efficiently and smoothly. Although NetApp storage comes with a basic ability to respond to storage problems, this is often not enough to prevent inefficiencies in NetApp storage. For machines that need to store large amounts of data, having efficient data and storage resource management can help save time and money. 

The NetApp storage monitoring software in SolarWinds SRM is designed to help spot performance problems before they happen, providing predictions, graphical data use displays, and alerts when data storage is about to run out. This NetApp storage monitoring doesn’t just monitor capacity, but it also monitors trickier data efficiency concerns, like I/O hotspots—areas of the NetApp storage system where slowdowns might occur due to high input/output activity, causing inefficiencies in the data collection system. These hotspots include filers, RAID groups, volume levels, and more. NetApp storage monitoring can keep an eye on these hotspots in real time and through historical trends, which can help improve your understanding of what parts of the NetApp system need to be monitored or potentially expanded. 

A NetApp storage monitor isn’t just a useful addition to a NetApp storage system—it’s just one part of a larger storage monitoring solution provided by SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor. SRM is also a flexible collection of storage monitors for different data storage programs—not just NetApp. SolarWinds SRM can monitor data performance from EMC SAN arrays, NAS arrays, NetApp, Nimble, Infinidat, Pure Storage, and many other storage device vendors with the ability to collect and display these insights in a central dashboard view. 

Using a central dashboard, SRM can manage all these data storage systems at once, providing capacity monitoring and alert capabilities regardless of the storage provider. SRM is built to help ensure there’s no need to settle for one single storage system when a combination of different systems could provide a more sophisticated approach to your data management.