If you're not familiar with what we do:

Aptitune has been building performance analysis tools for UNIX and Linux operating systems for the last 15 years. The thing that sets us apart is the fact that our tool, SarCheck, uses resource utilization data as input, and produces output which is a plain English report, not just an assortment of graphs. We make concrete performance tuning recommendations, explain the reasons for those recommendations, and discuss what we see in English. We try to look at resource monitoring in a different way.

Technical people can use the tuning recommendations to quickly improve performance and response time. These reports are easily understood and can be given to management in order to explain the nature of a problem and its solution, or to help justify the need for a hardware upgrade. This is what we've done for some operating systems and we can do for the same thing for modern storage architectures. We have already started building this tool for the EMC Clariion.

Here's what we're building:

We're building something similar to our SarCheck performance tool. The Clariion is an amazing machine but basically, it's really just a specialized computer. It has processors, memory, disk drives, and maybe even EFDs (flash drives). There are many parameters that can be used to tune the operating system and just like any other modern computer, there is an art to tuning those parameters to optimize its performance.

Some examples of the output:

Here are some recent examples of the Clariion analysis output. These examples are from our effort to control how verbose the output is and we go from really terse to really verbose with tables. In between, we have quiet, normal with tables, and verbose with tables.

We're looking for beta testers:

We are looking for more beta testers. What we need from our beta testers is the CSV formatted data produced by the Navisphere Analyzer tool. We're still talking about the exact format which would be best for us, but don't worry about that. We'll get that sorted out quickly. If you've got a CX4, CX3, or any of the older models like CX300, CX400, CX500, CX600, or CX700, just send us what you've got and we'll get started. We will occasionally want to talk to you about your system and whether the bottlenecks that the tool sees as it monitors your Clariion array are likely to be correct. When our tool starts to make tuning recommendations (high/low cache watermarks, prefetch multipliers, etc.) based on the utilization of storage processors, LUNs, and other resources, we hope that you will implement the recommendations that make sense and tell us if performance improved.

At first we'll analyze the data in our labs. Once the Clariion tool is stable, we will want you to try it so that you can analyze your data at your site. We expect that the tool will run on Linux x86 first, and in the future it will run on other platforms as needed. Being in a beta program can be a rewarding experience for all concerned. You are likely to learn more about your systems and you will influence the direction of our work. We'll learn about the factors that affect real world performance tuning. And we won't take up much of your time.

Interested?

If you're interested, please contact us. Tell us you've got a Clariion with Navisphere Analyzer and you're ready to begin. There's no obligation and we don't need you to sign an NDA. If you can't do beta software in your shop but you're interested in what we're doing, contact us anyway. All we need are CSV formatted data files and you don't have to run anything special at your site. Or we can put you on the list and let you know when we're ready to start shipping.

To help you find where you're going:

EMC's Clariion array is sometimes spelled Clarion. If a search engine brought you here because you were looking for Clarion performance, Clarion monitoring, or anything like that, you may want to try the search again using the correct "ii" spelling.

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