Maxta provided analytics previously, but it was limited to data on an individual cluster, MxIQ broadens this to add metrics from additional clusters and additional data, to provide a greater degree of visibility and insight.
Hyperconverged software provider Maxta has significantly upgraded their software’s analytics capabilities with the launch of their MxIQ analytics-insight platform. Its real-time analytics combined with AI is designed to eliminate issues before they occur by providing real-time, deep-learning visibility into customers’ private cloud and multi-cloud environments, and allow Maxta’s channel partners to more effectively manage these deployments.
“We had an AI capability before, but previously it was on a per cluster basis inside the customer’s own data centre, and it was just on that isolated cluster,” said Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP, Product Management at Maxta. “The MxIQ platform aggregates information across multiple clusters and aggregates metadata across multiple customers as well. That allows it to provide a lot more insight, by aggregating multiple clusters and multiple customers, to provide a broader context to assess the likelihood of there being a potential problem.”
The analytics capability was developed in-house, and is deployed on the AWS cloud.
Maxta MxIQ collects metadata through pre-installed agents on customers’ servers and transmits it securely to the MxIQ cloud-based service. The system’s artificial intelligence algorithms assess these metrics and trends, to recognize potential impacts on system health and availability, and allow for proactive technical support to be provided. MxIQ gives historical data trends for capacity and performance, as well as metadata on cluster configuration, licensing information, VM inventory and logs.
“If, for example, the AI sees peaks of performance in a 24-hour period, it can indicate that if the trend continues, the customer will run out of capacity,” Sreenivasamurthy said. “It can also correlate with other resources like CPU and memory, as well as the storage. That lets it distinguish between the ability to fix a potential problem by adding a few drives, and the need to add a new server instead because the system is also running low on another resource like compute.”
The current version of the MxIQ is free, but there will be a paid version which adds additional machine learning capabilities.
Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP, Product Management at Maxta
“These machine learning abilities will learn from what customer has done based on alerts provided, without the need for manual intervention,” Sreenivasamurthy stated. The time frame for availability of this paid version will be in late Q1 or early Q2 of 2019.
“It’s a really good solution for partners,” said Barry Phillips, Maxta’s Chief Marketing Officer. “It’s available in a new release, so there’s no need to upgrade on the fly. It also greatly improves partners’ ability to provide value-add support. With this visibility, they can see a drive that’s wearing out. It adds much more value to what they do.
“A big issue for partners now is that they don’t have insight into their customers’ operations,” Sreenivasamurthy added. They have to call them. This gives them a very good view of what’s going on among their customer base. It means that when they talk to customers, they can tell them things of value. It increases their upsell opportunities.”
