Technology - Storage

Say Goodbye to Your iSCSI and CIFS Performance Problems

Modern network storage devices provide fast and reliable access to some of the most important enterprise data and are widely used in today’s application environments. However, due to the complexity of these storage systems, storage often becomes the bottlenecking link in application performance. Some of the unique performance challenges related to storage systems include:

• Complex configuration settings – Storage management involves its own share of complexity, with many potential options designed to help customers create the ideal environment for scalability and redundancy. Unfortunately, the proper configuration settings are highly dependent on the application mix and unless properly tuned, the storage system easily can become a major performance bottleneck.
• The storage black box – To manage storage effectively, administrators must understand the demands made on the storage arrays. Often, the tools are not in place for IT organizations to truly grasp the access patterns within their storage environment and the behavior of the individual storage components. As a result, it is very challenging to balance utilization and performance of these storage systems.
• The deviant-user effect – Storage systems are shared resources that often support many users and applications simultaneously. Due to the architecture of most storage systems, a single user or a deviant process can slow down the performance of the entire array for all users and applications. These types of problems tend to be extremely difficult to track down.
• Impact of server virtualization – Consolidated virtualization infrastructure has a unique I/O profile, typically generating high rates of I/O to storage arrays, including more paging and page thrashing. This high level of random I/O can generate significant storage array cache misses, which in turn lead to more trips to disk, slowing down overall application performance.
• Considerations around WAN – Op—WAN optimization has become a popular technology for addressing some of the more common storage-related performance issues. However, not all application mixes are suited for WAN optimization, and making this determination often is difficult.

With the ExtraHop system, you can gain insight into storage performance with the ExtraHop Storage Module, featuring full support for iSCSI and CIFs protocols.

ExtraHop can help

• Provide tuning guidance – Through detailed metrics on actual storage usage, the ExtraHop system shows a complete picture of the health of the storage system and helps to identify areas that need to be tuned.
• Pinpoint storage issues – The ExtraHop system provides error details down to individual files for common storage systems; this information reveals when performance problems occurred, who is experiencing the problems, and which files caused the issues.
• Identify WAN Optimization Candidates – With a full history of transaction details, the ExtraHop system is a valuable aid in determining which files are suited for WAN optimization and how best to implement WAN optimization based on your specific application mix and usage patterns.

Solutions

• Overview
• Customer Success

• Solutions by IT Challenge

• Service Assurance
• Troubleshooting
• Performance Tuning
• Capacity Planning

• Solutions by Technology

• Load Balancer/ADC
• Database
• Storage
• Virtualization
• Cloud