Chapter 1: What are the key features of OnCommand Unified Manager 7.2?
This week on the Tech on Tap podcast, we take a look at the new and improved on-command unified manager version 7.2. Welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast. Hello and welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast. My name is Justin Parisi, and on the phone with me today is the awesome Glenn Sizemore. I was going to say accountable because I'm present. Accountable. Well, you're present in digital form.
It's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's okay, though. We'll pixelate you some other time. Hey, man, I'm more present than Andrew. You are more present than Andrew. Andrew is currently on the road taking his beard show on the road, the container show. I guess dog and container show, maybe? I don't know.
Maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of exciting stuff coming out of DockerCon for sure. I can't wait till Sully gets back so he can pick his brain.
That's right. We actually had a preview last week with Sully. We talked about DockerCon and the Docker volume plugin and all that goodness. But this week, we are going to be talking about OnCommand Unified Manager, which has a new release coming out very shortly. And to do that, we brought in Philip Bachman and Yossi Wise. Did I say that right, Yossi?
Yes, you did. Thank you.
Oh, good, good. All right, so let's start with you, Yossi. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do here at NetApp, and if we want to reach you on social media or email and give us that information.
Sure. So I'm in product management in our data fabric manageability group. And I have on-command unified manager and performance manager as a product. And I usually can be easily found on LinkedIn. So if you look for my name and especially the last name, the way it's spelled, W-E-I-H-S, you'll certainly find me.
All right. And Phillip, tell us about yourself.
So I am a solutions architect, part of the America's Solution Architects team. I carry a specialty basically for management software and for MetroCluster. So unified manager is something I've been living with for a long time now. You can reach me on social media. I think also the best way to get to me would be through LinkedIn as well.
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Chapter 2: How does Unified Manager 7.2 improve performance and usability?
Um, now everything's in one place and in the UI is also running on a single server. So you've, you've taken some of the latencies out of the two talking to each other and just made it much more friendly and usable. And I've shown it to a couple of customers already as part of NDA, and they're very pleased with the improvements in the performance.
Have we changed any of the actual interfaces in terms of how we're writing the code? I mean, have we gone from something like Java to HTML5 or something along those lines? No.
We're bringing it together. There were actually, as they were two products, they were developed on two slightly different platforms. Those are being merged together right now. It's not 100% complete, but it's mostly complete, and the difference is huge. You'll also see that the interface has been streamlined a bit and cleaned up, and it looks a lot more like
the rest of the NetApp product world in terms of where we've put menus and how you move through the UI and all. So there's some overall improvements in just the functionality and the feel. And customers that I've shown it to are finding it much easier to move around and find things.
Yeah, you know, when we look at some of the changes that we did in here as part of merging this, we've actually retired hundreds of thousands of lines of code because we basically, as we merged the two appliances, we cherry picked the best of breed code from each of them and sort of retired the rest.
So it's all, you know, the back office part is still Java, but on the front end, we're migrating pages from previous web technologies to HTML5. This will be an ongoing migration, but we've made a lot of progress in this release.
And what about the database? I mean, I know previously with like Data Fabric Manager, which is basically its grandfather, it was running on a Sybase database. Are we still using that or are we using something else?
So when we ship the product initially, we're using a commercial version of MySQL. We've since moved to the open source version. And, you know, now we've sort of merged everything into a single copy of the database and And I think that there is a lot of effort that went into tuning the database, tuning the tables, indices, everything else, so that we will run really efficiently.
And what we found was that the two databases actually had a lot of duplicate information. So as we bring it together, customers will also realize the disk space savings.
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Chapter 3: What changes have been made to the database in Unified Manager 7.2?
And that's huge because let's face it, our customers don't typically want to have to be dropping unified manager servers everywhere. So along with those performance improvements and the impact that they have in the environment as a whole, we've seen that we're able to scale the system better. And there have been some significant improvements there.
We've benchmarked it against larger populations of systems. And honestly, I think that and the new scale monitor that's built into the system will drive forward a lot of happiness in our customers because then they're not asking me, I have to stand up how many systems in order to monitor this environment? We won't be getting that kind of pushback, I don't think, any longer.
So you touched on being able to access this from anywhere in the world with low latency. It kind of made me think, are we doing anything with mobile?
So that's a great question. So OnCommand Unified Manager is an on-premise solution. The web technologies that we're building it on with HTML5 use a concept called responsive design, where the web pages will sort of auto-size depending on the screen size. If you choose to use a tablet or mobile device, the pages will look right on them. That being said,
There's still a hurdle here to jump in terms of getting a mobile device that's off the corporate network access to actually getting to the server. And that's an area where we are looking into covering with mobile apps and some other support offerings that will be also coming up soon. Can't share more details at this point.
Okay, fair enough. So as far as the scaling goes, I mean, we've kind of touched on that in general terms. What kind of scale are we looking at now? I mean, how big can we go?
Well, we're publishing a set of overall guidelines, but what we found in the testing of it is that we're able to handle significantly larger installations. One of the things that we've done to enable that is that we have built into the product, and honestly they weren't there before, are a set of scale monitors that will alert the user when they start to tax the server.
So if they start to tax the CPUs or tax the memory footprint or tax the disk space, It'll tell you that, and then you have the opportunity to grow more. So the scaling is going to be much more dynamic. It's not just going to be, here it is, it scales this big and you're done. The idea is that it should be able to handle growth of the customer. Is that a fair statement, Yossi?
It is, Phil. It is. And that dynamism goes in both ways. So in the past, a lot of customers liked to stand up another system in a lab, and they were complaining about having to put in all these reservations and all these, invest in putting a lot of resources against that.
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Chapter 4: How does Unified Manager 7.2 enhance scalability for users?
Because this has been what we've been asking for for a while, was to reduce that overall footprint because it was a little onerous. It was kind of ridiculous how much resources we were demanding of a customer just to be able to draw a performance graph for a storage controller.
To get all of that right-sized and repackaged into something that more matches modern deployment patterns and practices, of course, across the board.
All right, so we talked about performance. We talked about scaling. We talked about unifying. What else do we have for us that's new?
One of the dirty little secrets was that up through version 7.1, you only had two platforms of choice you could deploy Performance Manager on. Now with the unification, all three of our supported platforms are available. So you have the virtual appliance. You have Red Hat Linux native installer. And you have Microsoft Windows native installer.
And that gives you full support for Unified Manager and Performance Manager on any of those three platforms.
No Mac support?
Yes. Don't you dare.
There is no shade. No. There is no shade right now. If you've got a big enough back, run it in a VM.
If you've got a big enough Mac running in a VM. That's pretty much what we've all resorted to for most things when we deal with Macs.
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Chapter 5: What new deployment options are available in Unified Manager 7.2?
It is a journey and it, and it is also an evolution, you know, I'll call maybe you commented earlier in security and there's an area that, that has gone through a transformation and a lot of learning and customer feedback for us. Um, and that's around the security and patching of our third party components that we use, such as the MySQL database.
And what we've learned there is that a lot of customers want to really be in the driver's seat and control when and how patches get rolled out. And so as we've released one release after another of Unified Manager on Linux, we've actually been slowly morphing the way we package it to the point where we are actually not shipping those third-party components anymore.
And we have opened it up so that customers can basically patch these at their own time and leisure. And, you know, that removes a lot of the friction from the security process.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, guys, we're sitting here like nerding out in like these really deep details about like how you micromanage deployments and how exactly this bit of software is going to fit into a customer's larger data center ecosystem. But the interesting thing is, this is where these products live and die.
And this is where they either succeed or fail because they live in a part of the stack that has zero tolerance for being special snowflakes, right? Or demanding that things work differently. And instead, it lives in a world where you have to plug into whatever that organization's best practices are, whatever they believe how these things should work.
That's how you have to conform and you have to be able to survive in there. Yeah. You know, it's it's it's one of those interesting spots. You know, the step one is just make sure the performance data is there. Make sure the alerts fire. And when I say create a volume, it better create it. You know, but but in a lot of ways, personally, I think that's the easy part.
The hard part is then going through that growth period of deploying this thing and a couple thousand enterprises all over the size spectrum and learning all of the ways that your product doesn't work for them and going and fixing those challenges. Right.
It is. It definitely is. And, you know, we've been going through an evolution here because the industry has been evolving, right? So a lot of customers remember DFM4 and DFM5 or Unified Manager 5, and, you know, they draw comparisons between them. But the reality is that what we did with Unified Manager 5, where we basically shipped a single Linux tarball with everything in it,
That's just not cutting it today because customers really want to be in control and audit about any and every piece of software that goes into their environment. Heck, we've had some corporate customers reach out to us and ask to run Black Duck scans on all the third-party components and only use certain versions that are blessed by their gods, if you will. I believe that.
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Chapter 6: How does Unified Manager 7.2 address security and patching concerns?
So when you see probably one of the most frequent calls I get is around, hey, our security folks just hit us up with a new CVE that came out of CERC. What do we do and where are you patching it and all? So we obviously recognize that for the OVA is where we control everything.
We have to stay on top of those, but for the customers who are on the Windows platform or the Linux platform, they have the ability to step up to those. fixed versions or those patched versions at a time of their own choosing. Now, if only we could get customers to upgrade as frequently as we put the software out, everything would be just super.
We're getting there, man. That's the other side of this learning curve, of the evolution that we were discussing a moment ago about how deployments patterns are changing. We were talking about it two, three episodes ago, but that's part of the other side. The customers demanding more from the vendors, yes, that's the part that as a vendor we see most often.
But the other side is coming, which is organizations that are – building that muscle memory and becoming more comfortable with deployments. The IT industry used to just be like this giant thing that was patterns and practices around avoiding change and offloading risk. And in a lot of ways, that's not the business we're in anymore. Now we're in the business of innovation and solving problems.
And those are two completely different ends of the spectrum. And there's just a lot of people who are on that seahawk. and they're not quite comfortable with where they're sitting right now, right? So we're all kind of, we're balancing it back out and finding a new equilibrium, I think.
Absolutely. And we're seeing that change, and hopefully what people are seeing is that we're adapting to that change.
At least with OCUM we are. There's some other teams we can get in here and yell at some more, but you guys are doing great.
There's a feature that we've added, I believe, a couple of releases ago, but probably hasn't gotten enough attention. And that's the ability to customize and extend the events that Unified Manager can actually monitor and alert on. So basically, any event that's raised by ONTAP, Unified Manager can capture that and do further processing and tracking of that in Unified Manager. So that's
something where a customer would select specific events that are relevant for them and configure that extensibility in Unified Manager.
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Chapter 7: What integrations and customizations can users expect in Unified Manager 7.2?
that Yossi talked about, I think, is somewhat understated. The ability to grab or to subscribe to EMS alerts off the system and get basically near real-time alerting so you're not waiting for a fault in the interval. That is huge and that plays very well with the customers.
Philip, Yossi, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about OnCampaign Unified Manager's new release and the true unification of the product. If you want to get in touch with Philip or Yossi, let's go around once more time and see how you can get in touch with them. Philip?
You can get the best of me through LinkedIn, Philip Bachman on LinkedIn.
And Yossi. Same for me. LinkedIn is what I choose to, what I check every day. So it's Yossi Weiss at LinkedIn. W-E-I-H-S.
All right, that music tells me it's time to go. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email to podcast.netup.com or send us a tweet at NetApp. As always, if you'd like to subscribe, find us on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Stitcher or via techontepodcast.com. If you liked the show today, leave us a review.
On behalf of the entire Tech On Tap podcast team and Yossi and Philip Bachman, thanks for listening. On-command unified manager. Truly unified.
Oh, yeah.
Now I can use my unified manager and play Minesweeper at the same time. That is what I do with Windows.
Minesweeper.
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