Introducing NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11
It’s just been six months and we are back with the new release of NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager. Elated to announce the release of NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11 so, hold your breath as we walk you through the enhanced storage monitoring capabilities with this release.
What's new in Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11?
A simple yet critical question for storage admins would be “How protected is your data?” While you think of possible answers to the question, we continued to drive the initiative of strengthening your Data protection and security monitoring story. As part of the AIQUM 9.11 release, we enhanced some existing features and introduced new features. Let’s take a quick look at these new enhancements and features introduced with the Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11 release.
If you are new to NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager, check out the video NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager—Use Case.
Active IQ Unified Manager Data Protection
When you want to know “How protected is your data?” – you need not worry as we’ve got your back with the new Data Protection Dashboard. Active IQ Unified Manager now provides you with a detailed data center level summary of data protection details. The new dashboard includes protection events, volume relationships protected with NetApp Snapshot™ copies, and volumes protected with NetApp SnapMirror® relationships.
With the new Data Protection dashboard, you can now get details of volumes being protected by SnapMirror (Local and remote) and can easily drill down to the relationship Grid in UI to get more details on the volume relationship status whereas the ‘Unprotected’ bar navigates the user to the volume grid.
The dashboard shows the volume relationship count by health where it provides details of all the healthy and unhealthy volumes and allows you to drill down to a detailed relationship grid to get more details. If you want to keep a check on the lag status of volumes, we’ve got you covered. You can now get a volume lag status and also the lag time and get volume relationship count on the data protection dashboard as a one-view.
When it comes to the protection of data, we tend to take no chance and keep you notified of the associated issues or potential risks via EMS events. With this release, we have introduced 2 new events to showcase that –
- Volume has insufficient local protection - to notify the user to change the Snapshot policy on the volumes with high levels of activity
- Volume snapshot space is under utilized - to keep a check on the capacity which could be utilized more and is currently being wasted by leaving the capacity on the table
The above events carry the suggested next step in the event details so that the user once hit with the issue can follow the recommendations to fix the issue. Other than above mentioned events, 2 existing events have been updated to provide the recommendations to fix the issue.
Support for SnapMirror Business Continuity in Active IQ Unified Manager
SnapMirror Business Continuity (SM-BC) can be used to protect applications with LUNs, enabling applications to fail over transparently and ensuring business continuity in case of a disaster. SM-BC protects applications with iSCSI or FCP LUNs. AIQUM 9.10 introduced the discovery and monitoring of consistent group relationships and composite LUNs with support for performance troubleshooting of workloads hosted on these composite LUNs. With this release, you can now also monitor the mediator status and events related to mediator relator issues or risks. The mediator provides an alternate health path to the peer cluster, with the intercluster LIFs providing the other health path in case of a storage outage on the primary so, AIQUM keeps you well informed on the status of your mediator and also, generates events for addition or removal of the mediators. A check on mediators and reporting the same gives an overall picture of how securely would your failover mechanism perform.
Anti-ransomware monitoring in Active IQ Unified Manager
We understand that ransomware protection requires more than detection so with Active IQ Unified Manager 9.10, we introduced support for anti-ransomware events for volumes and Storage VMs. With this release, we’ve taken a step ahead to ensure that your data is safe & secure with us by enabling intuitive visualization of the volumes and Storage VMs anti-ransomware status. You can now get a consolidated view on the Security dashboard for the Volume anti-ransomware status as well as storage VM status for each cluster.
You also get a new view ‘Security – anti-ransomware’ for volumes and storage VMs which support anti-ransomware where you can download a consolidated security report as well to keep a tab on the ONTAP storage systems.
Introducing Certificate Management with Active IQ Unified Manager
We understand how essential are the certificates today as they allow us to identify trusted individuals and organizations. They are critical for creating trust in today’s ever-growing connected world and it’s crucial to keep a tab on your certificates and manage those. This release of Active IQ Unified Manager introduces a new panel on the Security dashboard to monitor the status of your certificates whether they are ‘Active’, ‘Expired’ or ‘About to Expire’. You can also get cluster certificate status in the Security-view of Clusters. Not only do we notify you of the expired certificates but also of the certificates that would expire in the coming 60 days.
This covers certificate status monitoring but what next? Don’t worry we’ve got your back!
You can now launch System Manager from the certificate status hyperlink from Unified manager UI itself to take appropriate required actions to manage your certificates.
Install and start using Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11 today
With all these new features and enhancements, we recommend you to install and start using Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11 to leverage it’s capabilities for ONTAP monitoring, reporting, and active management needs. Check out all the new feature enhancements to learn how AIQUM can help manage and monitor your ONTAP systems in your data center.
Download NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager 9.11 today from the software download page of the NetApp Support Site.
Find out more
For a list of links to the blogs, visit the Where can I learn more about Active IQ Unified Manager? post.
