Violin Memory - Violin Systems

Violin Symphony

Abstract This white paper illustrates how Violin Symphony provides a simple, unified experience for managing multiple Violin Memory Arrays. Symphony facilitates scale-out deployment of large numbers of Memory Arrays in the data center with a wide suite of next generation storage management features.

White Paper: Violin Symphony

Table of Contents 1 Introduction................................................................................................................................ 3 2 Centralized Management .......................................................................................................... 3 3 Smart Groups............................................................................................................................. 5 4 Customizable Dashboards ....................................................................................................... 6 5 Proactive Monitoring and Notification..................................................................................... 7 6 Real-time Performance Insights............................................................................................... 9 7 Comprehensive Reports ......................................................................................................... 10 8 Summary .................................................................................................................................. 11 Table of Figures .................................................................................................................................... 12 About Violin Memory ............................................................................................................................ 12

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1 Introduction Violin Symphony provides a simple, unified experience for managing multiple Violin Memory Arrays. Symphony facilitates scale-out deployment of large numbers of Memory Arrays in the data center with a wide suite of next generation storage management features, including: • Single management platform for multiple Violin arrays • Smart Groups for scale-out storage management • Personalized customizable dashboards • Proactive health monitoring and notification • Real-time performance trending and historic analysis • Comprehensive reports library

Figure 1: Symphony web-based interface enables management through devices of your choice

2 Centralized Management Violin Symphony provides the convenience of monitoring and administering all the Violin flash Memory Arrays through a unified web-based user interface. Any Violin 6000 series array can be seamlessly brought under Symphony’s management with just a single click, without any software change or disruption on the array. Once an array has been added under Symphony’s management, Symphony continuously collects all information from the array and presents it in various ready-to-consume formats through the web interface.

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Symphony supports the entire portfolio of Violin Memory 6000 Series arrays, across all combinations of performance and capacity. With support for Violin Memory Operating System (vMOS) versions 5 and 6, Symphony enables all the storage management and data protection operations to be performed through the unified interface. A single instance of Violin Symphony can be used to securely manage multiple Violin Memory flash Arrays, even if they are distributed across multiple data centers. In addition to the default choice of http, Symphony offers the flexibility of using https for added security while exchanging information with the arrays. Once the arrays have been added into Symphony’s management domain, administrators can perform all operations on any of the managed arrays by just logging into Symphony. To facilitate user management, Symphony offers three different authentication models – Microsoft Active Directory integration, LDAP integration and support for local authentication. Symphony remembers the array credentials and uses them for all administrative tasks on the array, thereby enabling single sign-on convenience. Roles and privileges can be specified for each user for finer-grained security model with role-based access control.

Figure 2: Centralized management and administration of all Violin Memory arrays through Symphony

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3 Smart Groups Symphony allows arrays to be classified into logical management groups, based on multiple criteria such as names, software versions, capacity, performance or user-defined tags. Administrators can dynamically group arrays to suit their management needs – such as groups based on physical location, business unit, applications or tiers of service. With performance and capacity aggregation across all arrays in a Group and Group-specific health monitoring, Symphony simplifies scale-out storage management with Smart Groups. Arrays can be added to Smart Groups based on several filter criteria, such as name patterns, software version, array model or capacity. To map Smart Groups more closely to business needs, Symphony allows user-defined tags to be added to the array and then, for Smart Groups to be created using the user-defined tags as a filter. When the array is re-purposed to a different application or different business unit, all it takes for the array to be re-assigned to the right Smart Group is for the tag to be updated. Symphony consolidates performance, capacity and health information across all the arrays in a Smart Group and presents the aggregated information to the user. Most screens and reports in Symphony can be customized to limit information to arrays from specific Smart Groups. This allows for administrators to be presented with information that pertains to the specific group of arrays that they are responsible for. Groups can also be nested to form a hierarchical relationship, to better reflect the administrative model of the enterprise.

Figure 3: Sample organization of Violin arrays into Smart Groups based on business unit & geographic location

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4 Customizable Dashboards Dashboards enable single-glance visibility into the most critical information on the LUNs and arrays that are most relevant to the user. Symphony dashboards are fully customizable – each user can have their own dashboard, which is presented to them every time they log in. Symphony has a rich set of dashboard gadgets, providing single-glance information on performance trends, health status, actionable alerts, space map and so on. Users can further personalize the gadgets to reflect information from the LUN, array or group of arrays that is of most relevance to them. Symphony allows each user to build their own dashboard with several information-rich gadgets, including: • Performance: Real-time read, write and total performance metrics along three key dimensions – I/Os Per Second (IOPS), Latency, Bandwidth for a LUN, array or Smart Group • Performance trends: Trend line graphs of IOPS, latency and bandwidth, with zoom-in analysis and troubleshooting capabilities. Information presented at level of LUN, array or Smart Group • Alerts: All active critical, warning and information alerts presented in single list, with detailed information into the alert and single-click jump to the array for further troubleshooting. Customizable to specific array or Smart Group • Indicators: Visual status of critical health indicators – including power, temperature and fan status • Health: Overall health status of all arrays in the management domain, with ability to filter based on health status and quick insight into array bandwidth. Customizable to specific arrays or Smart Groups • Space usage: Detailed categorization of array space utilization across thick LUNs, thin LUNs, snapshots and free space. Customizable to individual array or Smart Group • Space map: Quick glance information into free space availability across all arrays, to assist rapid LUN provisioning. Customizable to Smart Group • Top arrays: Rank stacked listing of arrays based on performance and utilization – can be ranked based on IOPS, latency, bandwidth or used capacity. Customizable to Smart Group • Top LUNs: Rank stacked listing of LUNs based on performance and utilization – can be ranked based on IOPS, latency, bandwidth or used capacity. Customizable to array or Smart Groups • Inventory: Consolidated information on number of active LUNs, ports, initiators and sessions across all arrays in group. Customizable to Smart Group

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Figure 4: Fully customizable personalized dashboard provides full flexibility to administrators

5 Proactive Monitoring and Notification A key operational challenge facing storage administrators is detecting and resolving health risks and performance bottlenecks, even before these issues can risk the applications or impact end users. Violin Symphony continuously monitors various health and performance aspects of all the arrays and proactively notifies the administrator of any storage risks. • Customizable rule engine: Symphony provides administrators the flexibility of creating any number of health rules, based on multiple criteria such as temperature, fan status, VIMM health, free space and so on. The rules can specify warning and critical thresholds for these metrics and can be applied on specific arrays or a pre-defined Smart Group. Symphony will immediately alert the administrator when any of the metrics in the specified health rule(s) are violated.

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• Performance-based SLA monitoring: Enterprises increasingly rely on the performance of the underlying storage to meet the Service Levels of Availability expectations of business-critical applications – accordingly, Symphony provides the unique ability to define performance-based health rules that can proactively detect performance bottlenecks. Rules can be defined with warning and critical thresholds for IOPS, latency and bandwidth of managed arrays. Similar rules can also be applied on all arrays that belong to pre-defined Smart Groups. • Flexible notifications: Symphony offers great flexibility in delivering the alert notifications - the alerts will be immediately displayed in the dashboard and other locations within the UI. In addition, each rule can specify a set of email addresses and Instant Messenger accounts that need to be notified. These options offer administrators the convenience of receiving notifications on their favorite device, without even logging into Symphony. The notifications can also be delivered through SNMP traps for automatic integration with other Help Desk ticketing applications or customized script handlers

Figure 5: Symphony provides proactive single-glance visibility into risk indicators and potential bottlenecks

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6 Real-time Performance Insights Violin Symphony’s built-in advanced analytics engine provides powerful real-time data and historic trends on various health and performance aspects of Violin Memory arrays. Besides providing detailed insight into storage performance, these rich analytics also provides powerful planning data for IT managers to accurately forecast and manage future demand. • Performance trends: Symphony collects real time information on the IOPS, latency and bandwidth of each Violin flash Memory array and presents this information through simple to interpret performance graphs for the administrator. Performance trends are available for the entire array as well as for individual LUNs. This gives administrators the flexibility of monitoring the performance of the array from a storage perspective and from an application perspective. • Extended data retention: Performance information from every monitored LUN in every array managed by Symphony is retained for up to 2 years. To optimize the space used for saving the performance data without compromising the insight gained from the historic information, Symphony employs advanced database optimization to retain real-time information for up to 24 hours, one data point for every 5 minutes for up to 2 weeks and one data point for every hour for up to past 2 years. The zoom-in feature of the performance graphs allows the IT manager to select specific periods in the past and gain detailed information for this time period. • Share with ease: All the performance reports, including the performance trends, can be saved as a pdf file or sent to email addresses specified by the user. To assist further analysis using other tools, the performance data can also be exported into a csv format. Symphony also supports a RESTful API that can be used by scripts to extract the performance data, down to the level of an individual LUN. IOPS, latency and bandwidth information is automatically aggregated across all arrays in user defined Smart Groups for ease of analysis.

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Figure 6: Real-time performance trends with historic insight for up to 2 years

7 Comprehensive Reports Symphony supports a comprehensive library of more than twenty ready-to-run reports. The reports provide detailed information on different aspects of the managed arrays such as the space utilization of the arrays, performance characteristics of the LUNs, health history of the arrays and top arrays classification in terms of performance or space utilization. Reports can be published in pdf format, exported to csv format or sent to a specified email addresses. Each of the reports can further be customized - for instance, the reports can be filtered based on data patterns in specific columns, based on specific Smart Groups and so on. The visible columns in the report as well as the time range used for performance and health reports can also be further customized. Symphony provides the flexibility of saving the customized reports and making it available for other users to use as part of the shared reports library.

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Figure 7: Symphony makes it easy to share critical information with a rich set of customizable reports

8 Summary With built-in, hardware-accelerated and flash-optimized RAID protection and wide striping, Violin Memory Operating System already eliminates most of the complicated storage management operations. Violin Symphony further revolutionizes the operational experience of storage administrators and IT managers by allowing storage provisioning, data protection and storage optimization operations to be performed on any of the managed arrays through a single unified interface. Symphony’s highly modular architecture makes it a scalable and extensible management platform for supporting Violin Memory’s growing portfolio of Flash Memory products.

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Table of Figures Figure 1: Symphony web-based interface enables management through devices of your choice.......................................... 3 Figure 2: Centralized management and administration of all Violin Memory arrays through Symphony ................................ 4 Figure 3: Sample organization of Violin arrays into Smart Groups based on business unit & geographic location ................ 5 Figure 4: Fully customizable personalized dashboard provides full flexibility to administrators .............................................. 7 Figure 5: Symphony provides proactive single-glance visibility into risk indicators and potential bottlenecks ........................ 8 Figure 6: Real-time performance trends with historic insight for up to 2 years...................................................................... 10 Figure 7: Symphony makes it easy to share critical information with a rich set of customizable reports .............................. 11

About Violin Memory Violin Memory is pioneering a new class of high-performance flash-based storage systems that are designed to bring storage performance in-line with high-speed applications, servers and networks. Violin Flash Memory Arrays are specifically designed at each level of the system architecture starting with memory and optimized through the array to leverage the inherent capabilities of flash memory and meet the sustained high-performance requirements of business critical applications, virtualized environments and Big Data solutions in enterprise data centers. Specifically designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin’s Flash Memory Arrays can scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IOPS with low, predictable latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Violin Memory products, visit www.vmem.com.

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Violin Memory, Inc. 4555 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA 94054 USA Tel: 1-650-396-1500 • Fax: 1-650-396-1543 www.violin-memory.com

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