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INTERSCAPE's PERFONICS™ TOOLSET BASED SERVICES

Typical challenges in implementing infrastructure related projects for large enterprises can slow down the delivery and miss target dates.

Challenges like:

  • No up-to-date latest empirical data that provide application and related infrastructure views
  • Disparate OEM management tools and how to integrate into project data
  • Low-confidence CMDB data
  • None or incomplete views into application-to-application connectivity

Manual data sources in various document formats makes life difficult for the technical teams owning the projects

Perfonics™ - Overview

Interscape’s Perfonics™ Toolset based services provides a cloud-based solution to the difficult problem of discovering the enterprise storage and compute infrastructure in a painless manner. The services are led by a Interscape Technical Architect/SME and includes Perfonics™ Tool License and a back-end customization Team that integrates customer environment to Perfonics™ for seamless delivery.

Infrastructure data is discovered and mapped from disparate sources that provides an end-to-end view from Applications down to storage and databases. This is particularly very helpful for very large enterprises that have multi-petabyte storage and thousands of servers. The solution also excels in dealing with multi-vendor storage and systems platforms.

The bundled service works exactly like our branded Performance As A Service™ and Capacity Planning As A Service™ methodology which includes a SME, the Perfonics™ toolset license and a back-end team that customizes the reporting and analytics for the IBM clients. The SME can be remote or onsite with Perfonics™ toolset on the cloud or on premises.

Perfonics™ Data Collectors can also be deployed on premises for small to very large environments for automated infrastructure discovery.

"Bottom-Up" Approach

Perfonics™ tool uses a “bottom-up” approach by first discovering key attributes like storage and network nodes and then mapping the data back to compute and applications. All SAN/NAS connected devices are discovered. Additionally, the network discovery goes out to TCP/IP level data that includes TCP port level connectivity. This data can further help to map upstream and downstream applications to define application dependency for disaster recovery priorities. This forms the backbone of the Perfonics™ Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping services.

Perfonics™ can leverage data from various multi-vendor SAN, Storage, Compute management OEM tools. The raw data can be either collected by Perfonics™ or the data can be pushed by the client without any needs of credentials.

End-to-End reporting provides an in-depth view into storage and compute currencies in terms of various Firmware, OS, SW Packages, Patches, Middleware, Database version information.

Perfonics™ Scalable Architecture – Large Enterprises

Perfonics™ has a historically proven scalable architecture that scales very well for large enterprises. The scalability is primarily needed for the data collectors. Interscape has implemented multiple enterprise level projects working with companies like IBM, Kyndryl, Dell EMC etc. The size of the projects generally is into thousands of servers and hundreds of applications and storage arrays.

The data collectors are customized and integrated to the customer infrastructure environments to only collect relevant empirical data to provide a set of deliverables focused on the specific project or being delivered as part of business-as-usual services to the technical and management teams. The data collectors work with Base Lists that are converted into Collect Lists by applying a target “command” collection. These collect lists run on a Collection Schedule on continuous basis. Perfonics™ can pull the data from various sources if the credentials are provided, otherwise the data can also be pushed to Perfonics™ if needed without having to need the credentials.

The Parsing Automation Engine employs “File Fingerprinting” technology to identify the type of incoming data coming in to invoke the correct process to ingest the data for reporting and analytics. This empirical data can then be further updated via the various dashboards to further integrate into the analysis.

A simplistic model is used for the exchange of data that is being “pushed” to Perfonics™ via a NAS volume generally.

Perfonics™ Dashboards for Technical SME's

Various dashboards are provided in Perfonics™ for easy access to the reports and analytics for the technical SME’s supporting the project.

  1. Reports Dashboard
  2. Perfonics Data Collector Dashboard
  3. Issues Dashboard
  4. Logs Dashboard
  5. Tools Dashboard
  6. File Upload Dashboard
Perfonics™ "As A Service" – Typical Implementation
  • Discover Infrastructure Dependencies and Connectivity Via scalable Automated Perfonics™ Data Collector.
  • Pull Data from compute platforms or have the existing OEM applications push the data
  • Storage and Compute Currency Discovery and Reporting (FW, OS, MW, DB)
  • Prod to DR Mapping using empirical data in addition of ingesting existing CMDB data
  • Help with Runbook creation for Disaster Recovery failover
  • Ingest data from Multi-Vendor Infrastructure Tools into Perfonics™ – CMDB, Data Marts, VMware, IBM TPC, EMC/Dell SRM, NetApp OCI, Tivoli etc.
  • Create Application Dependency Maps for Each Application with upstream/downstream discovery
  • Application Topology Views
  • End to End Views (server to storage to databases)
Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping
  • Ingest Data from Multi-Vendor Infrastructure Tools Into Perfonics™
    • CMDB, Data Marts, VMware, IBM TPC, EMC/Dell SRM, NetApp OCI, Tivoli etc.
  • Discover Infrastructure Dependencies and Connectivity Via Automated Perfonics™ Data Collector
    • Server to server connectivity, Services running on server, Data flow (upstream/downstream)
    • Outgoing connections and Incoming connections
    • TCP/IP Port level data
  • Collect Key Attributes for Application Mapping and Dependency at one place
    • App ID, App Name, App Tier, Server Name, Platforms, Locations, Server Functions (Web/App/MW/DB), Environments (prod/dev/test), LoB/BU, etc.
    • Auto Discovery of Storage Devices, Capacity Views, Performance Profiles etc.
    • End to End Views (server to storage to DB)
  • Create Application to Infrastructure Maps for Each Application
  • Create Application Recovery Priorities based on dependency discoveries
Perfonics™ "As A Service" Goes Deep and Wide

Perfonics™ Toolset based “As A Service” model can be leveraged to provide visualizations and input to following types of projects and stakeholders.

  • Application Dependency and Infrastructure Mapping
    • Application to Infrastructure Mapping
    • Application discovery
    • Application Dependency
    • Discovering upstream/downstream connectivity
    • Production to DR mappings
    • Discovering Replication Patterns
  • Performance Analytics
    • Performance Analytics across entire infrastructure
    • Best Practice Alerts
    • SLO Outliers
    • Application IO Profiles
    • Pro-active IO bottleneck analysis
    • IOPS, MBPS, Service Time, Response Time, RW Queues etc.
    • Root Cause Analysis
    • Health-Check Reporting
  • DR Change Management & Configuration Reporting – customized
    • Compute: CPU, Mem, FW, BIOS, Physical/Virtual, etc.
    • Storage: Drives, FS, Utilizations, SAN/NAS, HBA etc.
    • Network: NIC Models, Bandwidth, IP/NW info, etc.
    • Software: OS, Installed Pkg, versions, drivers, etc.
  • Migration Planning
    • Optimized Source to Target Planning at Array level and Front-end port level
    • Pre-vs-Post Performance & Capacity Planning
    • Pre-migration & Post-migration IO Baselines (configuration, capacity, performance)
  • Consolidation Modeling
    • Array level consolidation
    • Front Port level modeling
  • Storage Optimization
    • Tiering Recommendations
    • Reclamation of orphan storage
  • Host Currency Remediation
    • OS/FW/drivers etc. (using grabs)
  • Capacity Planning
    • Array level capacity utilizations
    • Storage Group level utilizations
    • Trending & Forecasting
  • Disaster/Recovery Audits
    • Synch & Asynch replication audits
    • R1/R2 failover modeling
  • Backup/Restore Infrastructure Health
    • Application to Server Backup Audits
    • Performance Analytics
    • Restorability Audits by Applications
    • Jobs/Logs Analytics: Success/Failures, Policies, Job Types, Errors etc.
  • Asset Inventory
    • Asset reporting with capacity utilizations
    • CMDB Feeds to current systems
  • Configuration Reporting
    • Microcode/FW Level visibility
    • Host IO Limits, SLO Config, Paths
Perfonics™ Competitive Edge
  • Brings “as a service” approach and methodology to projects that are traditionally executed onsite and are resource intensive
  • Includes an SME and a back-end remote customization team – Immediate expert resource availability
  • Instantly engage on a project with minimal customer resource requirements and minimal or zero travel expenses
  • Highly automated – included very matured Perfonics™ toolset license
  • Highly customization – included back-end team
  • Bundled fixed price – defined scope, timeframe and deliverables
  • Can be used to augment current projects with tight budgets or lack of expertise
  • Can be leveraged over longer time without having to pay continuous billable resource
  • Highly scalable with proven delivered projects for over 50PB storage and 30,000 servers
  • Leverages data from current OEM infrastructure management tools such as CMDB, Data Marts, VMware vCenter, IBM TPC, EMC/Dell SRM, NetApp OCI, Tivoli etc.
  • Onsite or remote data collectors to automate collection
  • No credentials needed if data pushed to Perfonics™
  • Analytics report that provides end-to-end view
  • Minimal resource requirements from customer
Perfonics™ ROI
  • Perfonics™ “As A Service” is a tool based highly automated solution with single SME engagement that provides a very quick ROI compared to resource intensive onsite teams that require multiple SME’s for each technology layer
  • Smaller projects that can span long timeframe can also leverage the service by spreading the delivery over agreed upon timeframe
  • Fixed price approach with defined deliverables that provides exactly what is needed
  • No additional third-party software required