Leveraging Big Data to Improve Reliability & Maintainability

Big Data has brought tremendous opportunities for Reliability & Maintainability professionals. This paper shares how NetApp leverages big data from NetApp's AutoSupport (TM) feature to deliver industry leading reliability and preventive maintenance. When AutoSupport is enabled, NetApp systems in the field periodically send selective system data to a NetApp corporate repository. This system data, consisting of configuration and log files with warnings, error messages and various sensor readings contains gold nuggets, which if mined and analyzed properly, can be of great benefit for improving system R&M. A few case studies are presented to show the effectiveness of the approach. These cases address the effect of cooling air temperature on hardware reliability, characteristics of DRAM memory errors, NAND flash field characteristics and preventive maintenance of defective memory modules. Results from each case also provide answers to some frequently asked questions in the computing industry.