Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This week on the Tech on Tap podcast, we invited the service level manager team to talk about how they're helping you automate all the things. Welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast. Hello and welcome to the Tech On Tap podcast. My name is Justin Parisi and I'm all by myself in the studio. All by myself. Actually, I'm not going to sing to you. Andrew's on the phone.
Let's see what Andrew has to say about all this.
I'm kind of glad I'm not there with you. I'm a little afraid right now.
Well, I actually did a concert before we actually started. That's how I actually motivate myself is singing all by myself.
Is that how you warm up your radio voice?
Yeah, that and lemon juice and honey.
Oh, I thought it was hot toddies.
Actually, it was a lemonade and a chicken bagel. I see. Yes. Anyway, so today's show we're going to talk about the new service level manager here at NetApp. It's a new product or feature or something along those lines. We'll let the guys talk about what it actually is here in a second. So today we got a few guests over WebEx. Say hello, Naga.
Hi, hello. This is Naga, the product manager for service level manager product.
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Chapter 2: How does the NetApp Service Level Manager simplify storage management?
You mentioned things like IOPs per terabyte, right? And you mentioned things like peak latency or an RPO if you're talking about a data protection service. You define services in very abstract terms, something that you can measure after your provision and actually produce a report to a customer and say that, look, this is what I promised and this is what I delivered at the end.
So the key understanding here is that a disk drive is not a service, right? SATA, SAS, SSD, different sizes of drives, different vendors, different controller types. None of those things constitute a service. An application doesn't consume any of those. An application does one thing. It consumes IO at a latency. And so that has to be the performance promise.
So can you explain the decision process? So if I create a service that says I want maybe 500 IOPS per gigabyte and I point SLM at my ONTAP cluster, which has a myriad of aggregates with different disk types and capabilities and controllers and all of these other things, how does it actually go through that selection process?
Yeah, so that's probably the interesting question we need to answer. How do we do this magic, right? Now, if you look at it at the end of the day, to manage the SLOs, you need to know what are the capabilities of the resources, right?
And we need to discover the capabilities in the terms that I just explained to you, right, in terms of IOs per terabyte that the resource can deliver, what is its peak latency when I put more IO in it, and things like that. So what we do is when you want to manage a storage system by, you know, social objectives, you go to our GUI and add it to the system.
And then we automatically discover the capability of the system, right? For example, we use the reverse sizing process to figure out what's the total IOPS that can be done on a given node and aggregate, right? And we book it back. And we also know that for given workload of certain block size, certain percentage of random region, right?
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Chapter 3: What are the benefits of using the Service Level Manager for storage operations?
What is the latency you expect from the system, right? And it depends on how much of cache you have in the system and things like that. So we catalog all this information in our database. And when a user comes and says, like you just said, that you want a terabyte of storage with certain service level, we take all the SLOs into account, right?
We take into account the latency requirements, the IOPs per terabyte requirements, the RPO requirements, right? Not to mention RPO is very important when you talk about disaster recovery, right? And then we figure out what is the best place to onboard that workload, right? It could be a file share or a volume.
and then we go and do the appropriate provisioning in terms of storage configuration like provisioning volume settings, QoS settings, and other things.
So a couple of questions come to mind. So one, what is the extent of operations that we're able to abstract through SLM? So for example, you mentioned resiliency, high availability. Are we capable of defining as a property for that service level that I want to have it replicated? And if so, can I specify different service level service levels for that target?
The properties that you can define or the attributes that you can use today to define a service level is mostly performance and protection, right? Because these two things are fundamental in terms of any service, storage service, right, that you offer. In terms of high availability and many other things, they're pretty much standardized, right?
All CMODE systems are developed in an HA configuration, right? They kind of provide a similar kind of availability. Or the only difference we see is in a metro cluster and non-metro cluster scenario where you can think about the availability going from four nines to five nines and things like that.
But the fundamental problem is in terms of defining a performance objective and a protection objective. And today, the first version talks about specifying these objectives when you define a service level.
So SLM goes through, it makes a provisioning decision based off of the requirements. Am I as an administrator able to override that? So for example, it selects aggregate one for a particular workload, right? I'm trying to, maybe I'm planning a new workload that's managed outside of SLM or something like that. I want to move that volume from aggregate one to aggregate four, right?
Is SLM going to have issues with that? Can I correct it, if you will?
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