Nimble Storage Performance Correlation Analysis Demo

Gim Mahasintunan, Principal Engineer at Nimble Storage, presented a demonstration of Nimble Storage’s Performance Correlation Analysis on November 7, 2014, during a Tech Field Day event. The focus of the presentation was on the capabilities of InfoSight, Nimble Storage’s comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform. InfoSight is designed to provide proactive wellness, performance troubleshooting, and an extensive ecosystem that feeds back into the company. The goal is to extend the power of InfoSight from physical storage environments to virtual environments, enabling per-VM virtual monitoring without requiring any modifications to the virtual infrastructure. This is achieved by running an agent on the Nimble array, which gathers topology and performance metrics from the virtual machines and hosts.

During the demo, Mahasintunan showcased how InfoSight can be used to troubleshoot common issues such as the “noisy neighbor” problem, where one virtual machine (VM) negatively impacts the performance of others. By searching for a specific VM, users can analyze its latency and correlate it with host activities, breaking down the latency into categories like host, network, and storage. This is done without needing to install any additional software on the ESX hosts or VMs, as the Nimble array communicates directly with the vCenter environment to gather necessary statistics. The demo also highlighted the ability to drill down into data store latency, IOPS, and throughput at a minutely level, providing detailed insights into the performance of individual virtual disks within a VM.

The presentation also touched on the future direction of InfoSight, including potential support for other hypervisors beyond VMware, such as Hyper-V and Xen. Mahasintunan emphasized that the current demo was a pre-release version, giving attendees a preview of features that were expected to be available in the coming year. The demonstration illustrated how InfoSight’s advanced analytics could quickly identify performance issues and their root causes, thereby enhancing the management and optimization of virtual environments. This expansion of InfoSight aims to provide the same level of detailed monitoring and proactive management for virtual environments as it does for physical storage environments.