White Paper

EMC STORAGE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SUITE

How Storage Resource Management Suite Meets Todays Storage Management Challenges

Abstract The Storage Resource Management Suite provides comprehensive monitoring, reporting, and analysis for heterogeneous block, file, and virtualized storage environments. It enables you to visualize applications to storage dependencies, analyze configurations and capacity growth, and optimize your environment to improve return on investment. This white paper outlines the common use cases Storage Resource Management Suite addresses. March 2013

Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. VMware is registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part Number H11199

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

Table of Contents
Executive summary.................................................................................................. 4
Audience ............................................................................................................................ 4

Storage Resource Management Suite benefits.......................................................... 4

Watch4net .......................................................................................................................... 5 ProSphere .......................................................................................................................... 5 Storage Configuration Advisor ............................................................................................ 5

End-to-end performance analysis ............................................................................. 5

Oracle performance ............................................................................................................ 5 Virtual environment performance ....................................................................................... 7 SAN performance ............................................................................................................... 8

Configuration validation and compliance ................................................................. 9

Compliance with best practices .......................................................................................... 9 Storage service reports ..................................................................................................... 10 EMC Support Matrix validation ......................................................................................... 11

Capacity analysis .................................................................................................. 11

Raw capacity usage .......................................................................................................... 12 Usable capacity ................................................................................................................ 13 Usable capacity by purpose .............................................................................................. 13 Usable capacity by service level ....................................................................................... 14 Explore storage capacity ................................................................................................... 14 NetApp Filer capacity ........................................................................................................ 15

Custom chargeback reports ................................................................................... 15 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 18 References ............................................................................................................ 18

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

Executive summary
Between 2012 and 2020, the patch of the digital universe that CIOs and their IT staffs need to manage will become not just bigger but also more complex. The skills, experience, and resources to manage all these bits of data will become scarcer and more specialized, requiring a new, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure that extends beyond the enterprise: cloud computing. To this end, the number of servers (virtual and physical) worldwide will grow by a factor of 10 and the amount of information managed directly by enterprise datacenters will grow by a factor of 14. Meanwhile, the number of IT professionals in the world will grow by less than a factor of 1.5. This rapid data growth means that despite continued reductions in the cost per TB, total investments in storage will continue to grow in the future. Optimizing your resources and improving your productivity are essential to controlling these IT costs. Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite can help your organization to gain the visibility and control needed to improve your productivity, increase your utilization, and optimize your resources, while consistently meeting service level requirements.

Audience
This white paper is intended for all storage managers, architects, and administrators who need to understand and manage the impact storage has on applications.

Storage Resource Management Suite benefits

Storage Resource Management Suite provides the solution to managing and troubleshooting todays storage systems. Storage Resource Management Suite enables you to better: View, in real-time, the performance and health status of your storage environment Monitor storage service levels by customizing SLA dashboards and setting alerts to be notified when service levels are about to go out of compliance Optimize capacity to align with performance and business requirements Reduce application downtime by being aware of the relationships and dependencies between applications and storage Align cost of service delivery to business requirements with charge or view back reports Continuously validate compliance of the storage environment with design best practices and the EMC Support Matrix (ESM) Analyze performance from the application/host perspective and correlate it with historical storage metrics to identify workloads and assess the impact of changing workloads

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

Storage Resource Management Suite comprises Watch4net for Storage, ProSphere, and Storage Configuration Advisor.

Watch4net
Watch4net is an enterprise reporting and analysis tool that provides real-time historical and projected visibility into the performance of applications, servers, networks, and storage. Report packs for leading applications help monitor and report on application service levels. Report packs enable you to understand application performance and availability and correlate its relationship with the supporting storage infrastructure. Storage Resource Management Suite includes report packs for VNX (block and file), Symmetrix (VMAX), Isilon, VPLEX, SAN (Brocade and Cisco MDS), IBM DS, IBM SVC, HP EVA, NetApp Filer, ProSphere-SCA, VMware, and Oracle. In addition, there are over 100 report packs and data collectors that are optionally available.

ProSphere
ProSphere offers host to storage end-to-end visualization and analysis for EMC storage environments. It provides a dashboard view that offers insight into where and how capacity is being consumed and when more will be required. Its end-to-end performance analysis enables you to quickly spot bottlenecks and troubleshoot problems. Integration with EMC element management (Unisphere for VMAX, SMC/SPA, CMCNE/BNA) improves productivity. It also provides deep analysis of differentiating EMC array features such as FAST VP and Federated Tiered Storage helping you get the most out of their investments in EMC storage.

Storage Configuration Advisor

Storage Configuration Advisor tracks changes to the storage environment and validates those changes against best practices and the EMC Support Matrix (ESM). Ensuring compliance with best practices and the ESM plays an essential role in service assurance. Automating this process also improves productivity by eliminating time consuming manual validation processes.

End-to-end performance analysis

Application performance is impacted when the underlying storage system is unable to meet the workload requirements of the application. Storage Resource Management Suite enables you to analyze host, application, and storage performance to identify workloads and assess impacts. This enables you to understand the impact storage is having on your application performance.

Oracle performance
Using the ReportPack for Oracle, performance and configuration information is easily obtained as shown in Figure 1. The ReportPack for Oracle provides unified monitoring of all the Oracle database applications distributed in your network. This report pack

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

monitors the status and performance of Oracle databases by retrieving performance data from the built-in Oracle statistics views. This information helps you to: Verify hit ratio about cache, dictionary cache, latch cache, library cache, sort and sessions Check tablespace and datafiles size evolution Survey the Oracle core processes, such as the System Global Area (SGA) Monitor user activity by viewing the number of sessions, number of commits, CPU utilization, and so on Understand the workload peaks and busy hours

The top section of the report in Figure 1 shows the most important indicators of the overall health of the Oracle database. The Databases APG Stress, RAC Downtime, and Instances Downtime sections display inventory and performance metric information. The Inventory, Performance Scorecard, and Situations to Watch sections contains a list of reports that are useful to rapidly detect problems or performance degradations across the environment.

Figure 1Oracle top-level report

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

You can drill-down in these sections to get more detailed information.

Virtual environment performance

Using the ReportPack for VMware, you can view the performance and configuration information for the virtual machine running the Oracle instance, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2Virtual host performance report

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

The ReportPack for VMware provides reports of the VMware infrastructure. This report pack helps you to gain an understanding of the VMware performance. With this information you can: Maximize utilization of your virtualization environment Determine the amount of storage utilization in your datacenters Understand your VMware virtualization activity, such as which host or virtual machine has the highest CPU or memory workload

The dashed lines in the Processor and Memory sections are thresholds that you can set. You can define a warning threshold, which is the lower dashed line, and an error threshold, which is the higher dashed line. These thresholds enable you to set service levels. If these service levels are crossed, a notification is generated so that you will be immediately notified of the situation.

SAN performance
Using the ReportPack for ProSphere-SCA, you can view SAN performance information, as shown in Figure 3. The virtual machine is highlighted in yellow, indicating that it is the map subject. Maps display objects in the SAN that are connected to the map subject. Clicking an array, for example, will cause the map to display all of the fabrics, switches, and hosts that are connected to that array.

Figure 3Topology of virtual machine When a host is highlighted in the map, the Details panel below the map provides additional information about that host. The Attributes tab provides information about the device and for VMAX arrays provides a link to launch Unisphere for VMAX. The Performance tab shows you the most relevant performance metrics. The capacity tab provides detailed storage information. Maps are always displayed in a Configuration Item (CI) Dialog. The CI Dialog includes the Map, Find and Overview panels, and a Details panel. Maps in the ReportPack for ProSphere-SCA are designed to display a limited number of CIs. For example, all

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

information displayed in a map is filtered based on the map subject. This allows you to see information directly relevant to the CIs you are interested in.

Configuration validation and compliance

Server virtualization has changed the way organizations manage storage in critical ways. It introduces a more dynamic infrastructure where virtual guests move between servers to optimize performance and availability. In this more dynamic environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure compliance with configuration best practices and interoperability requirements necessary to ensure service levels. Half of all SAN outages are due to improper configurations. For example, when a virtual guest is moved from a source ESX server to a destination ESX server, the highavailability redundancy that was available for the source ESX server may not be available with the destination ESX server; therefore, the virtual guest is at risk due to the configuration change. Configuration changes that are not compliant with your best practices or with the EMC Support Matrix can lead to application outages.

Compliance with best practices

Storage Configuration Advisor automates the process of validating your storage infrastructures configuration against EMCs proven leading industry best practices. The dashboard is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4Storage Configuration Advisor dashboard The dashboard provides a general summary of all active policy breaches, configuration changes, and the time it took for breaches to be resolved. A policy breach occurs when an object in the data center violates a user-defined policy. The dashboard is divided into three sections. The first view shows the distribution of breaches in the environment by severity. Below the chart is a table listing the number

EMC Storage Resource Management Suite

of breaches per severity level and the number of breaches acknowledged by users. The line graphs to the right display the number of configuration changes and breaches over time and the number of breaches that have been resolved. The Investigate view displays a list of all policy breaches, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5Storage Configuration Advisor Investigate view The Investigate view provides the following detailed information about each breach: Breach Causeslists the objects that breached the policy. Scopeprovides information about the associated policy scope and rule scope. Rule Informationprovides details about the rule that is breached, including a summary of the required state. Recommendationprovides a recommendation for addressing the policy breach. Mapdisplays a topology map of the objects that breached the policy. Breach Timelinedisplays the amount of time that has passed since the system detected the breach, the date and time of when the breach was detected, and the date and time of when a user acknowledged the breach.

Storage service reports

Storage Configuration Advisor provides a variety of reports, as shown in Figure 6.

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Figure 6Storage Configuration Advisor reports Various reports can be generated, including: configuration reports, compliance and service reports, and interoperability reports. All of these reports provide trending and summary information. For example, you can see the configuration changes that have occurred, filtered over the last week or the last three months. You can also see reports on switch connectivity information and service quality results, which can also be filtered over a period of time.

EMC Support Matrix validation

Storage Configuration Advisor downloads the EMC Support Matrix and validates your SANs compliance with its recommendations to give you assurance that your configuration has been thoroughly evaluated by EMC E-Lab standards. The EMC Support Matrix data is downloaded monthly to ensure that Storage Configuration Advisor is checking your environment against the latest ESM information.

Capacity analysis
With todays rapid data growth, it is impossible to keep pace without proper storage capacity management. You need to know how much storage you have and how it is being used. Storage Resource Management Suite improves capacity planning by tracking the consumption of capacity over time and predicting when more will be required not just for primary storage, but also for all replicas. Given the historical decline in disk drive prices, implementing just-in-time purchasing can result in significant savings on new capacity purchases. A holistic view of both primary and replica consumption trends enables you to improve capacity planning and reduce costs.

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Capacity questions can be easily answered using the capacity dashboard, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7ReportPack for ProSphere-SCA dashboard

Raw capacity usage

The Raw Capacity Usage report summarizes how the raw capacity is distributed: Used, Configured Usable, RAID Overhead, Un-configured, Hot Spares and Unusable, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8Raw Capacity Usage report Details for each category of raw capacity are displayed by drilling down into that category.

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Usable capacity
The Usable Capacity report summarizes how the available capacity is utilized across all discovered arrays. The bar chart has call-outs for each category of storage, such as Used, Free, and Pool Free with the corresponding percentages, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9Usable Capacity report Details for each category of usable capacity are displayed by drilling down into that category.

Usable capacity by purpose

The Usable Capacity by Purpose report provides transparency of the usable primary, local, and remote replicated capacity across all arrays, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10Used capacity by Purpose report Details for each category of used capacity by purpose are displayed by drilling down into that category.

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Usable capacity by service level

The Usable Capacity by Service Level report summarizes attributes and capacity metrics for all discovered Service Levels, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11Usable Capacity by Service Level report This report shows usable capacity service level names, amount of capacity, amount of free capacity, and percentage of capacity used as well as a monthly average and trend. Drilling down into the FAST VP service level displays additional details.

Explore storage capacity

The Explore area displays configuration items across the enterprise. The Explore area is broadly divided into two categories: Storage and Service Levels. Each category covers multiple types of configuration items. You can analyze LUNs, for example, by clicking LUNs in the Explore view, as shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12Explore LUNs report

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This report provides many LUN attributes and can be easily customized. Reports can be filtered and exported to PDF, CSV, XLS, PNG, JPEG, SVG, and XML format.

NetApp Filer capacity

The Storage Resource Management Suite supports EMC and third party block, file, and virtual storage. For example, NetApp Filer capacity information can be viewed using the ReportPack for NetApp Filers, as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13ReportPack for NetApp Filers dashboard This is the top level dashboard of the ReportPack for NetApp. It shows CPU Utilization for all NetApp Filers, CIFS Open Sessions, NetApp Storage Systems, Situations to Watch, Performance, Health, and Inventory. You can drill down into each of these areas for more details.

Custom chargeback reports

Storage Resource Management Suite is packaged with an extensive set of predefined and ready-to-use reports, providing your business with real value from day one. You can customize or create reports tailored to specific needs using the built-in tools. These tools include a graphical, wizard-driven report builder and a formula editor both of which use mathematical and Boolean operators to define custom KPIs. You can also customize and save your report tree and set the properties for reports and their display options. Figure 14 shows a predefined Chargeback by Group report.

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Figure 14Chargeback by Group report This report has two groups: Primary Chargeable and Total Chargeable. Primary Chargeback includes all primary storage, while Total Chargeback includes primary storage as well as local and remote replicas. The Distribution Details report shows the details for the group selected. To add the cost per GB of gold and bronze storage tiers to the Distribution Details report, you would use the Edit Mode interface, as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15Edit Mode interface

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The Edit Mode page displays the parameters that are used to construct the report. Since the Distribution Details report needs three new columns, one for the cost of gold storage, one for the cost of bronze storage, and one for the total cost of the storage, the Formula tab will be used to add the calculation columns. Formulas enable advanced computations on any number of values. You can apply formulas to any node of the tree. And formulas can perform operations independent of the context of the node they are applied to. The Formula wizard enables you to choose the formula you want to use. In this case, the Multiplication formula is used because the capacity of the gold storage tier will be multiplied with the cost per GB associated with this tier. Once the formula has been added, the formula edit settings appear, as shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16Multiplication formula for gold storage The formula edit settings show that the first operand parameter has been set to filter on all gold storage tiers. The second operand parameter has been set to a constant, $1.50 USD/GB. The Results Returned section shows that the results of this formula will be displayed in the report. Similarly, the report is edited to add the cost of the bronze storage tier and the total cost column. Figure 17 shows the results of the customized Distribution Details report.

Figure 17Customized Distribution Details report The Distribution Details report now shows the cost for the bronze and gold storage tiers as well as the total cost.

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Conclusion
The Storage Resource Management Suite provides comprehensive monitoring, reporting, and analysis for heterogeneous block, file, and virtualized storage environments. It enables you to visualize applications to storage dependencies, analyze configurations and capacity growth, and optimize your environment to improve return on investment. Virtualization enables businesses of all sizes to simplify management, control costs and guarantee uptime. However, virtualized environments also add layers of complexity to the IT infrastructure that reduce visibility and can complicate the management of storage resources. Storage Resource Management Suite attacks these layerssimplyby providing visibility into the physical and virtual relationships to ensure consistent service levels. As you build out your cloud infrastructure, Storage Resource Management Suite will help you ensure storage service levels while optimizing IT resources, both key attributes of successful cloud deployments.

References
The following are available on the EMC Online Support website: ProSphere product documentation Storage Configuration Advisor product documentation

ProSphere: Next Generation Storage Resource Management White Paper Diagnosing Performance Issues with ProSphere: An Introduction to Use Cases and Architecture White Paper

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