Monitoring Storage "Vital Signs" With Dell CloudIQ

Maintaining storage health is much like maintaining your personal health. It's important to monitor various vital signs.

Whereas your doctor might check your cholesterol levels, blood pressure and weight to gauge your personal health, storage vitals include things like connectivity, performance and available capacity. These vitals inform the actions you take — if any — to fix or prevent health issues. 

In both cases, the key is being proactive rather than reactive. To continue the previous example, if your cholesterol levels are approaching above-average numbers, you might adopt a heart-healthy diet to prevent worsening conditions like heart disease. The same approach applies to storage systems. If you detect consistently below-average performance, you might scale up your storage to prevent a significant slowdown for your end users. 

For many organizations, the main challenge with storage health lies in early detection. Without the right tools, maintaining a healthy storage environment is a manual, time-consuming process that often leads to reacting to problems rather than preventing them. 

Maintaining storage health requires constant monitoring of every storage array — depending on the size of the organization, there could be hundreds — to detect anomalies that must be remediated. Not to mention, this approach requires organizations to store and analyze that data. 

Just what the doctor ordered

Dell CloudIQ, a free, cloud-based application that provides storage health monitoring, insights, and analytics, allows organizations to act smarter and respond faster when it comes to their overall storage health compared to manual monitoring. CloudIQ provides 24/7 automatic monitoring of all compatible Dell storage arrays within an organization and reports findings in a simplified, cohesive view. 

CloudIQ covers the following Dell storage systems:

• Primary Storage
  • Unity/Unity XT (all models)
  • SC Series: Systems running SCOS 7.3 or later
  • PowerMax/VMAX: Unisphere for VMAX/PMAX version 9.0.1.6 or later
  • XtremIO: XMS 6.2.1 or later (for X1 and X2 systems)
  • PowerVault: ME4 (running GT280R004-01 or later) and ME5 systems
  • Isilon and PowerScale: Systems running 8.2 or later
  • PowerStore: all versions
• Connectivity
  • Connectrix: Brocade (FOS 8.2.1a or later) and Cisco (NX-OS 8.2(s) or later, except for 8.3(1)
  • PowerSwitch: OS10 version 10.5.3 or later
• Data Protection
  • PowerProtect DD: DDOS 7.4.0.5 or later
  • PowerProtect Data Manager: PPDM 19.1 or later
• Engineered Systems
  • VxBlock: Running VMware 6.5 and VxBlock Central 2.5, or greater
  • VxRail: Systems running VxRail 4.5.215, 4.7.001, or 7.0.000 or later
  • PowerFlex: Version 3.6 or later and PowerFlex Manager 3.7 or later
• PowerStore (all models)

For organizations utilizing any of the above Dell storage systems, getting started with CloudIQ is simple. The array element managers have a checkbox in their settings menu that enables sending data to CloudIQ.

Advanced monitoring and reporting

CloudIQ's 24/7 storage monitoring detects any potential issues, vulnerabilities, and anomalous performance activity within the environment. Based on the detections, CloudIQ assigns a health score to each storage system, making it easy to determine the systems needing attention. 

If a health score is low, the administrator can drill into that specific storage array to discover what's causing the poor health. Health score information can be accessed from anywhere via a web browser or mobile app. 

Additionally, CloudIQ delivers customized alerts and reporting, such as real-time detection notifications and daily health score reports. 

One of my favorite reports is the reclaimable storage report. This will look for LUNs with no attached hosts or IO activity or file systems with no activity.  How often has capacity been requested, provisioned, and never used? Or, have hosts been decommissioned without reclaiming their storage resources? This allows you to monitor and potentially remediate these situations, making sure you've committed only as much storage as necessary.

Licensing and support renewal reminders

CloudIQ tracks when organizations' Dell storage software licenses and support contracts are due for renewal. This helps organizations avoid last-minute surprises so they can plan and prepare budgets accordingly. 

Performance insights and predictive analytics 

Organizations can collect up to two years of historical data to analyze storage performance trends and patterns. Leveraging machine learning, CloudIQ pinpoints areas where future issues may occur. For example, CloudIQ can predict when an organization will max out storage capacity or when performance will start to decline. This allows organizations to proactively prepare for future upgrades and necessary scaling before the problem arrives.

Data security

By using CloudIQ, organizations avoid the costs of storing their own storage data without jeopardizing security. Storage health data is transported through a secure link from the array to Dell EMC's cloud infrastructure. CloudIQ only collects information about the storage system configuration, not the actual data stored on the storage system. 

From an organizational level, each CloudIQ customer has an independent secure portal to ensure data isn't shared outside of the organization. Within the organization, users can only view the storage health data for the storage systems they have access to which is configured through the Dell EMC Service Center. 

Utter simplicity

Going back decades, infrastructure teams have had to manage their own monitoring and trending software. To get new features, they had to deploy potentially destructive upgrades and then spend the next month getting things back in order. Additionally, this could bring about the need to order more physical servers (back in the day) or have additional VMs created to handle the new version. With CloudIQ, the software is managed by Dell's teams and upgraded by their SaaS teams as features become available. On top of that, when you log in, there is a popup showing you the new features since you last used CloudIQ. CloudIQ is just easier for everyone involved.

Dell is listening

At the top of every CloudIQ page is a feedback button. Clicking this allows you to send immediate feedback to Dell's product team. Providing real-time feedback to Dell is handy in itself, but getting responses to that feedback in near real-time is even better. When we've submitted feedback, either with issues, ideas or praise, the responses have come back within 24 hours.

The path to smarter storage health

CloudIQ offers organizations a plethora of valuable insights that can deliver a more reliable and better-optimized storage environment. We recommend reviewing CloudIQ reports on a monthly basis to identify immediate improvement areas and proactively plan for long-term optimizations. Our WWT team is happy to guide those conversations and help you make sense of the data to pave the best path forward for your organization's storage health.