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DELL EMC is calling its CloudIQ product the “fitness tracker” for Dell EMC storage. It provides a simple display to monitor and track the health of users’ storage environments. In a recent video, Dell EMC said data is the life of your business and storage is the heart. This is a great example when you are monitoring the overall performance of your business like a professional athlete. In sports, a similar analogy exists in sports science, the study of how the healthy human body works during exercise, and how sport and physical activity promote health – physically, mentally and socially. When applying sports science to professional athletes, it’s about a game of inches and being able to identify the smallest nuance can mean the difference of a win or loss.

Image: Application Of Sports Science Technologies: The Challenges Of Taking The Lab To The Field 

Applying that same idea to an enterprise customer, they are faced with new requirements and evolving data center workloads that require non-stop performance and availability. The only way to provide 24 hours, 7 days a week business operations and always-on performance is to see with clarity across the storage environment.

Taking this concept one-step further, if storage is the heart, then it is necessary to provide continuous cardiac monitoring for capturing irregular heartbeats. In a real-world example, any monitoring for heart rhythm disorder or atrial fibrillation would be the functional equivalent of monitoring for slow response time, running out of capacity or possibly failing parts in an enterprise environment.

Image - Multi-System Performance View – Storage Systems

If storage is the heart, then the Fibre Channel network would be the arteries and veins. The Fibre Channel network transports the life blood (data) to and from the heart (storage). It is critical to monitoring your heart and blood pressure to proactively manage your health.

Image - Multi - System Health View – SAN

Dell EMC CloudIQ has announced a CloudIQ collector that gathers SAN data through REST APIs, applying its machine learning and analytics to deliver intelligent health and performance projections. The CONNECTRIX Fibre Channel switch product line provides proactive, non-intrusive, real-time monitoring through its integrated network sensors that is feeding the CloudIQ collector. These sensors collect millions of behavior and performance insights to gain deep understanding into what is happening across the storage environment. Dell EMC Cloud IQ provides not just an overall health score view but also provides views into:

• Multi-System and Detailed Single System views of Health
• Configuration
• Capacity
• Performance

In keeping with the health analogy, a doctor can easily identify issues with the heart or other organs by analyzing the blood flow. In an enterprise environment, this is true with the Fibre Channel network as well.

Image - Multi - System Inventory View – SAN 

The power of these insights come from the ability to holistically take a deeper look into storage – essentially a one-stop shop for diagnostics.

CloudIQ is a great free cloud-based application that lets you easily monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot your storage environment from anywhere but when you need additional insight or need to make a change, you can pivot to Dell EMC CONNECTRIX SANnav.

Image - SANnav Functionality 

Dell EMC CONNECTRIX SANnav Management Portal is a new management application, architected from the ground up with a simple browser-based user interface (UI) and with a focus on streamlining common workflows, such as configuration, zoning, deployment, troubleshooting, and reporting. It also increases operational efficiencies with a modernized graphical user interface (GUI) that enables enhanced monitoring capabilities, faster troubleshooting, and advanced analytics. Key features and capabilities include:

Combining Fibre Channel network insights with storage insights creates a powerful toolset to simplify the identification of potential risks in the environment. For example a bottleneck in your data environment (e.g. a Slow Drain Device) would be the functional equivalent of a blood clot. It might be a partial blockage or a total blockage but the Connectrix SANnav Management Portal would allow you to see the clot and Slow Drain Device Quarantine (SDDQ) would provide an arterial shunt in an automated fashion at 02:00 in the morning so that the storage team can deal with the full solution more deliberately. This is an example of what makes the combination of DELL EMC CloudIQ and Connectrix SANnav Management Portal so powerful.