What's new for IBM Spectrum Control Version 5.3.7

New features and enhancements are available in IBM Spectrum Control Version 5.3.7.

Setting capacity limits
Support for Pure Storage devices
Monitoring DS8000 capacity on flash drives
Monitoring compliance with your license

Setting capacity limits

You want to know how much capacity you have left before your storage systems or pools are 80% full? Just, set a capacity limit and you'll know how close you are to reaching your capacity limit.

Try it out:

From the Storage menu, click Block Storage Systems. Right-click the storage systems you selected, and click Edit Properties. In this scenario, a filter was used to select IBM® SAN Volume Controller storage systems.

The screen capture shows how to set the capacity limit for the selected block storage systems.

Check the Capacity-to-Limit (GiB) column and see how much capacity you can use before you reach the limit. For more information about the capacity limit, you can add these columns to the table Capacity Limit (GiB) and Capacity Limit (%). You can also add Adjusted Used Capacity (%) to see how much capacity is used in relation to the capacity limit.

The screen capture shows capacity limit information and adjusted used capacity information for the selected block storage systems.

You can also set alerts to notify you when you are getting close to your capacity limit, such as:

If the capacity limit is 80%, you can set an alert to notify you when your storage systems or pools are 70% full.
If the capacity limit is 80%, you can set an alert to notify you when your storage systems or pools are within, for example, 10 TiBs of the capacity limit.

See Setting capacity limits. To define alerts for Capacity-to-Limit (GiB) and Adjusted Used Capacity (%), see Triggering conditions for storage system alerts and Triggering conditions for storage system internal resource alerts.

Support for Pure Storage devices

You can now add Pure FlashArray//M and FlashArray//X for monitoring and reporting to IBM Spectrum Control.

When you add the storage systems, IBM Spectrum Control collects information that includes metrics that measure the performance of the storage systems. You can view this performance information or you can specify alerts that are triggered when the performance of resources fall outside a specified range.

The screen capture shows the capacity and I/O rate for the selected Pure Storage FlashArray storage system.

When you add Pure FlashArray//M and FlashArray//X, you can monitor storage capacity across your storage infrastructure, and you can compare workloads and response times across your environment. Instead of using multiple tools, you can save time by using IBM Spectrum Control to create and schedule reports such as the Capacity report for Block Storage Systems for all of the block storage systems in your multi-vendor environment.

The screen capture shows creating the capacity report for all block storage systems including the Pure Storage FlashArray storage system.

See the External link icon Pure Storage support page for details about the supported storage systems. See also Planning for Pure Storage systems, Adding storage systems, and Performance metrics for Pure storage systems.

Monitoring DS8000 capacity on flash drives

You can now monitor the volume capacity that Easy Tier® moves to Tier 1 and Tier 2 flash, high-capacity drives on DS8000® storage systems.

You can monitor the capacity and available capacity of Tier 1 and Tier 2 flash drives in a pool and the distribution of volume extents across each of the Easy Tier drive classes. You can also define alerts so that you are notified when the available capacity on the flash drives in a pool falls below a threshold value that you specify.

The screen capture shows the Pools page for a DS8000 storage system showing the Tier Distribution for a pool with Tier 1 and Tier 2 Flash drives.

Monitoring compliance with your license

For storage systems that are licensed by storage capacity, view the capacity breakdown of the storage environment by the categories of drives that are used. The Category 1 storage category is now added for Storage Class Memory (SCM) drives and managed disks on Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud.

Use the License Compliance page to determine whether the total capacity of the storage systems that IBM Spectrum Control manages exceeds the entitlement of your product license. The capacity is shown in tebibytes (TiB), and is converted to storage capacity units (SCUs). By comparing the TiB or number of SCUs to the number that is covered by your product license entitlement, you can discover how much additional storage can be added before you exceed your license entitlement.

The screen capture shows the storage categories for Capacity for the License Model column of the License Compliance page for the selected stroage systems.

See License compliance.

Product fixes and security updates

In every release of IBM Spectrum® Control, IBM fixes issues that are reported by our internal teams and by our customers. Along with fixes, improving the operation and security of the product is also a priority. See what's been updated and fixed in this release:

Limitations and known issues

For information about limitations and known issues that might occur when you use IBM Spectrum Control Version 5.3.7, see External link icon Limitations and known issues.