New software isolates, monitors and analyzes NFS performance issues
Performance analysis should be left to the protocol experts — that is the belief of many, but it isn’t necessarily true. The performance analysis of network-attached storage (NAS) systems running the Network File System (NFS) can be intimidating except for a new service from CopperEgg called RevealStorage, which is targeted for use by IT managers and sysadmins.
In attempting to get visibility into their NAS infrastructure, IT managers have been faced with a myriad of management software and terms that are geared toward understanding and use by specialized storage administrators — concepts such as LUNs, zoning and masking that have nothing to do with an IT managers’ world of servers, networking and the disk drives attached to them. IT managers are familiar with terms such as latency, IOPs and response time and they want management software that provides them with answers in terms they already understand.
Further, when they set out to purchase performance management software, they will find software that only works on homogeneous storage platforms or is not granular enough to meet their needs.
IT managers will find that what they thought a product would do was more a matter of perception than reality. Looking to analyze network bandwidth problems or find out which user may be hogging a specific filer’s bandwidth, they may find that the product only analyzes problems in increments of five minutes, not the real-time that they need. Or, that the ability to get visibility into the network from the user level is not possible.
IT will find that a myriad of insufficiencies exist, among them the ability to manage only a single vendors’ product incrementally and without full visibility into the network.
That’s where CopperEgg’s RevealStorage service comes in. Available as a software-as-a-service offering from CopperEgg, the software lets IT administrators and systems engineers ‘peel’ the egg of NAS systems to reveal and simplify the layers and complexity of NFS inside. (To be continued in next Storage Alert Newsletter.)
