Next-Generation ONTAP System Manager: Simple, Flexible, and Agile

One of the most significant innovations in the next generation of storage management involves simplification of storage network and device management. With simplified storage management, your IT team can save time, allowing them to focus on driving your business forward. Simplified management also reduces the need for storage expertise to maintain your existing storage systems, which in turn reduces your overall storage operating costs. By its very nature, simplification also mandates a single endpoint system to manage the different storage tiers. So as the performance needs of an application change, be it a cloud or a new application, you do not need to rearchitect your storage.

And leading the industry in storage management simplification is NetApp® ONTAP® System Manager (formerly OnCommand® System Manager). With ONTAP System Manager, you can easily meet data management challenges today and in the future.

ONTAP System Manager gives you a simple, easy-to-use GUI to perform day-to-day storage management tasks. The built-in best practices for storage provisioning and protection also eliminate the need for you to have a storage expert on hand. With just one tool to manage across your architecture to support the latest ONTAP rich feature set, even your IT generalist can easily manage your NetApp storage.

Overview of the New and the Classic System Manager

In this blog post, we will look at a high-level overview of both the new ONTAP System Manager GUI, available from ONTAP 9.6, along with Classic version:

• The new GUI is in read-only view for the ONTAP 9.6 release.
• You do not need a separate installation to experience the new GUI. User can navigate to new ONTAP System Manager GUI by clicking on “Preview the new experience” link available in the Classic GUI.
• With built-in NetApp best practices, the new GUI is optimized for your IT generalist.
• You can seamlessly transition from the classic version to the new ONTAP System Manager GUI, without having to transfer your data.
• The new GUI includes built-in native ONTAP REST APIs, unlike the classic version, which includes a built-in ZAPIs.
• You can explore the new GUI without any risk of changing your storage infrastructure.

The following figure summarizes the benefits of the new ONTAP System Manager GUI.

Get a Comprehensive View from the Dashboard

Before you can fix any of your data management problems, it is critical to get a centralized, unified view of what is going on with your data. The ONTAP System Manager dashboard gives you a clear-cut picture of aggregated data activity across your storage ecosystem. You get an overview of your ONTAP system health, capacity, performance, and network.

And in the information preview message, you can use the link to share your feedback with us: Send us your feedback. At NetApp, we strive to constantly innovate and improve our products, and your feedback is an important part of that process.

In the new GUI, the Health portlet shows you in-depth hardware visualization of the health status of the nodes and disk shelves in your ONTAP system. You get quick details from the visual representation of the position or the bay of any failed disk.

The Capacity portlet gives you intelligent capacity reporting for both on-premises and cloud usage. You get a summary of the used and available capacity of your ONTAP system along with storage efficiency details and data space usage in the cloud.

With earlier versions of System Manager, you could view only real-time performance metrics. With the next-generation ONTAP System Manager, you can now view performance metrics for hour, day, week, or even historical performance metrics for up to the past year. This information can help you in performance troubleshooting and in understanding performance utilization over time.

The Network portlet gives you a host and storage view of all the objects in your network. You get a view with embedded links to hosts, ports, network interfaces, and storage objects. This view clearly points out with a red badge the objects that need attention, which in turn helps you to quickly know the overall status of your system. The following figure shows an example.

Easily Compare Storage Objects

The new and enhanced ONTAP System Manager helps increase the efficiency of your storage management workflows, reducing the pain and complexity of managing your storage. The peak view enables you to easily compare and navigate across storage objects, so you can fetch more details about objects such as storage virtual machines and volumes.

The increased agility in the new System Manager GUI tackles the limitations of the classic version of System Manager. The Search and Sort option is one such enhancement; you can easily find a particular volume from a huge pool of volumes in your cluster. For example, if you are looking for the volume Media_Vol among 1,000 volumes in the cluster, you can do a quick search in the new System Manager by using the Filter option. You can also perform a sort across the name columns.

Quickly Get Network Port Details

With the new ONTAP System Manager, you can quickly see the health status of network ports, containerized under each node. Along with the color-coded status of ports, it also shows you port details such as speed, type, connected network interfaces, and the maximum transmission unit.

Through the API logger that is available at the top right corner of name banner, the new ONTAP System Manager GUI helps you trace the latest API calls. It also includes a link to launch ONTAP REST API documentation.

You can watch the demo to learn the simplicity enhancements offered by new ONTAP System Manager 9.6 GUI.

Are you ready to simplify your storage management?

For more information about NetApp ONTAP System Manager, check out the following resources:

• ONTAP System Manager Documentation
• Field Portal collection (login required):
  • ONTAP System Manager 9.6 technical presentation
  • FAQ: name change from OnCommand System Manager to ONTAP System Manager
  • ONTAP System Manager datasheet
• ONTAP System Manager YouTube Demonstrations
• New System Manager Lab on Demand (available as part of ONTAP 9.6 lab general availability)
• Recent blog posts on ONTAP System Manager
• ONTAP System Manager datasheet (on netapp.com, no login required)