Dell PowerVault ME5 Series Administrator's Guide

Product features

PowerVault Manager provides access to many features that help you manage the storage system.

Some of the key features include:

• Storage system setup—the capability to initially connect to a system using PowerVault Manager. PowerVault Manager uses intuitive preboarding and onboarding steps to guide you through initial setup of your storage, as described in Configuring and provisioning new storage system.
• SupportAssist—the ability to monitor and proactively maintain the health of your ME5 Series storage system. SupportAssist is also required to use APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability, which is a no-cost cloud-based storage analytics application.
• ADAPT data protection—RAID-based data protection level that emphasizes efficiency, as described in ADAPT.
• Replication—the capability to replicate block-level data from a volume in a primary system to a volume in a secondary system, as described in Replication.
• Update firmware—the capability to notify users of available firmware updates to controller modules, expansion modules, and disk modules with newer and compatible firmware versions as they become available, as described in Updating firmware.
• Performance metrics—the ability to monitor storage system performance and statistics using graphs generated live or from historical data as described in Performance panel.
• Alerts—a robust storage enclosure health and notification system that is designed to identify actionable conditions and promote best practices, as described in Alerts panel.
• LDAP integration: the capability to use the external Lightweight Directory Access Protocol services on Windows systems for user authentication and authorization, as described in LDAP.
• SSDs—the ability to use solid state drives to enhance storage system performance, as described in SSDs. The ability to move data from one class of disks to another automatically, based on data access patterns, as described in Automated tiered storage.
• Virtual storage—a storage model that maps logical components to physical media-using paged-storage technology-to virtualize data storage, as described in Virtual storage.
• Linear storage—a storage model that maps logical components to physical media, as described in Linear storage.
• IPv6 support—the capability for the storage system to support Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) functionality (in addition to IPv4), as described in Configuring controller network ports.
• Redfish REST API support—the Redfish REST (Representational State Transfer) API provides the management data in a stateless, cacheable data representation. Read-only access is provided to physical and logical components that are related to the storage provisioning model, including disks, storage pools, volumes, and enclosures. The public APIs called DMTF Redfish and SNIA Swordfish are supported:
  • For technical information about DMTF Redfish, see Redfish standards.
  • For technical information about SNA Swordfish, see Swordfish.
  • The base URL for accessing the Redfish API capability is "https://<controller-module-IP- address>/redfish". (Enter the unquoted portion of the URL string into your browser address field using a valid controller-module-IP-address in place of the variable text.)
  • To obtain an open source cross-platform Python tool for provisioning and managing storage systems using the RESTful Redfish/Swordfish API see Seagate.
• VMware SRA and SRM support—enables the ability to integrate the Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) with the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to manage replication features for the storage system using the management interfaces.