Storage Management Challenges
Virtualization has delivered on many promises: massive consolidation, huge cost savings, dynamic scheduling and live migrations of applications and storage. But, with all the simplifications from virtualization, comes the complications of end-to-end visibility and management of the storage infrastructure through the various layers of abstractions. And, according to leading industry analysts, the data managed by enterprises is expected to grow to over 40ZB by 2020. This rapid data growth combined with increased service level expectations introduces new management challenges or the equivalent of wearing data center “beer googles” to see the real cost of your storage.
In this third of a 3-part blog series, let’s take a look at how EMC ViPR SRM provides a comprehensive monitoring and reporting solution to help you visualize storage relationships, analyze configurations and capacity growth, and optimize today’s storage resources while providing a management framework that supports investments in software-defined storage.
End-to-End Data Path Visibility
ViPR SRM was built to manage the complexity of growing, heavily virtualized storage environments. With ViPR SRM, you obtain detailed relationship and topology views from the application, to the virtual or physical host, down to the LUN to identify service dependencies, even for EMC VPLEX and the storage arrays managed by VPLEX clusters. By leveraging the capabilities of ViPR SRM, you will gain new insights into their environment and understand the impact of storage utilization from the applications. With increased visibility, you will be able to optimize their storage utilization and understand where and how their capacity is consumed and when more will be needed. Configuration validation will improve service levels by avoiding outages due to setup errors.
Check out the new ViPR SRM whiteboard video for more information.
Capacity and Performance Reporting and Trend Analysis
ViPR SRM can help users make the most efficient, cost-effective use of Flash-based storage, such as XtremIO or VMAX3. Performance trends and performance alerts (greatly enhanced in ViPR SRM 3.6) can help identify, remediate, and even head-off performance problems, by assisting the user in making data placement decisions that take advantage of Flash.
ViPR SRM can result in up to a 99% reduction in generating reporting costs. When troubleshooting an issue it takes 88% less time to discover problems with ViPR SRM. Testing showed the manual process required 4 minutes and 28 seconds to log into all the elements, give a cursory review of each, and export the data for review. With ViPR SRM, it took only 31 seconds to view and export the same data.
Read about these cost savings and more in the new test report from Principled Technologies.
Automating Chargeback and Show Back Reporting
Additionally, ViPR SRM automates service-level discovery and provides chargeback reports, in order to align the cost of service delivery with business requirements. And new support in ViPR SRM 3.6 extends automated service-level discovery and chargeback reporting to VMAX3 service-level objectives (SLOs).
Data Protection Integrations
ViPR SRM 3.6 has enhanced integration with EMC Data Protection Advisor. ViPR SRM 3.6 adds reporting on compliance with backup policies for EMC Avamar and Symantec NetBackup. ViPR SRM backup reporting includes a summary of backup and restore success rates, and presents unified information about the associated backup environment, which enables users to remain aware of current and potential issues. It also displays the number of files that have been backed up and restored, including views by server and policy over time.
The EMC RecoverPoint Solution Pack for ViPR SRM reports on lag time, WAN/LAN bandwidth, storage capacity consumption trends, system health and consistency groups. These detailed reports for VPLEX, RecoverPoint, Avamar and Data Protection Advisor provide you with greater insights for better, faster decision making.
If you missed the first two blogs, you can read them here and here. To learn more, please visit the ViPR SRM, XtremIO, VMAX3, and Data Protection product pages on www.emc.com.