Beyond being a druid, I am a Storage Architect with experience with arrays from HDS, NetApp, Compaq/HP, and EMC. This will be my space to talk a little about the things I see and the effect they will have on the industry.
Storage Reporting? Maybe try Aptare
Posted 06/08/09 at 8:33 PM by Zeln
The heavyweight management tool in the industry is EMC’s Control Center. This software package allows you to monitor, manage, and configure all aspects of your SAN and associated storage nodes. With a large amount of support for many vendors not EMC, this product can be your one stop shop for your needs.
Then why do many EMC engineers not use it when provisioning storage?
1. They’re not used to it. When you’ve done everything command line you already have an internal process.
2. It’s bloated and slow. When the product is designed to do everything, it does everything. There is an associated amount of overhead with all of that, and that affects them. When you have a deadline, the last thing you want is a gui popup status window.
All I want is a simple web report of utilization and the ability to do capacity planning!
Consider Aptare. The product grew out of their Backup Reporting, but has expanded to include Storage. It has a slick HTML output, and can give you storage, virtual machine, and replication reporting in addition to the Backup Reporting. While it will not give you in depth performance reporting at the LUN level, it will satisfy your ability to do capacity planning and, show pretty pictures to Management.
Be Aware
I’ve extensively used the Backup Reporter software. Upgrades were often nightmares, requiring extensive support from Aptare to complete, including multiple tables and tablespace renames (At one point they had two databases that would house competing information). On occasion I would find issues where they would incorrectly convert sizes (When 17TB becomes 17GB you have a problem). Finally, I saw a recent implementation where Aptare identified an EMC Symmetrix as a NetApp device.
This is a recommendation?
Even with these issues, I still recommend their product. Their support is very responsive and is able to work through all of these issues. Their storage product uses remote logins to remotely run native commands from the storage manufacturer, as opposed to an agent install. This method should produce good results with smaller overhead on hosts. In addition, many shops combine backup and storage management, which mkes this the perfect tool for projecting growth in both areas.
Check it out.
Storage Reporting - Storage Capacity Reporting, Data Backup Reporting, Netbackup Reporting, Web Storage
Then why do many EMC engineers not use it when provisioning storage?
1. They’re not used to it. When you’ve done everything command line you already have an internal process.
2. It’s bloated and slow. When the product is designed to do everything, it does everything. There is an associated amount of overhead with all of that, and that affects them. When you have a deadline, the last thing you want is a gui popup status window.
All I want is a simple web report of utilization and the ability to do capacity planning!
Consider Aptare. The product grew out of their Backup Reporting, but has expanded to include Storage. It has a slick HTML output, and can give you storage, virtual machine, and replication reporting in addition to the Backup Reporting. While it will not give you in depth performance reporting at the LUN level, it will satisfy your ability to do capacity planning and, show pretty pictures to Management.
Be Aware
I’ve extensively used the Backup Reporter software. Upgrades were often nightmares, requiring extensive support from Aptare to complete, including multiple tables and tablespace renames (At one point they had two databases that would house competing information). On occasion I would find issues where they would incorrectly convert sizes (When 17TB becomes 17GB you have a problem). Finally, I saw a recent implementation where Aptare identified an EMC Symmetrix as a NetApp device.
This is a recommendation?
Even with these issues, I still recommend their product. Their support is very responsive and is able to work through all of these issues. Their storage product uses remote logins to remotely run native commands from the storage manufacturer, as opposed to an agent install. This method should produce good results with smaller overhead on hosts. In addition, many shops combine backup and storage management, which mkes this the perfect tool for projecting growth in both areas.
Check it out.
Storage Reporting - Storage Capacity Reporting, Data Backup Reporting, Netbackup Reporting, Web Storage
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