The Best of What’s New: Improved dashboard and tiering analysis among highlights of IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights SaaS offering update!

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The IBM Spectrum Control™ Storage Insights SaaS offering model lends itself to more frequent, meaningful improvements for your consumer-oriented storage managing experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having said that, you spoke and Storage Insights listened!

 

The first look Storage Insights Dashboard now offers a more informative and insightful perspective on your storage. The new Dashboard now shows six portals of information to guide you in the creation and management of your storage environment. The new Resources portal was added to show an “at a glance” view of all the resources you are managing and enables you to easily add a new component. Also, performance information has been positioned to be upfront on the Dashboard in the form of the Performance portal; this view provides metrics for the storage systems you are monitoring.

 

Tier analyzing was updated to allow the exclusion or inclusion of volumes in your overall tier analysis.

 

The IBM Spectrum Accelerate™ storage system was added to the monitoring insights. You can now gain information into the capacity, space usage, and performance of IBM Spectrum Accelerate storage systems.

 

When you add IBM Spectrum Accelerate™, you can monitor the usage of storage space and the performance of the storage system on the Storage Systems page.

 

IBM Spectrum Accelerate, a member of the IBM Spectrum Storage™ family, is a software defined storage solution that is based on the XIV® system. To learn more about the IBM Spectrum Storage family, see http://www.ibm.com/spectrumstorage.

 

Snapshot of monitored resources on the Dashboard

The new Resources portal on the Dashboard shows:

• The number of file and block storage systems that you added for monitoring
• The number of servers that you added for monitoring
• The number of applications that you created to troubleshoot critical applications
• The number of departments that you created to monitor the capacity of the application's storage resources that departments consume

 

 

If you want to see a list of the storage resources or the resources that consume storage, click the number below the resource. If you haven't added a resource, such as an application, hover the mouse pointer over the number 0, and then click the plus sign.

 

Excluding and including volumes in the tiering analysis

 

You might not want to get tiering recommendations for some of the volumes in your data center.

 

For example, you might want to ignore volumes in your overall tier analysis, if you have volumes assigned to tier 2 that are used for weekly backups. You notice that most of the time, these volumes do not meet the criteria that your business organization setup on the Tier Planning page (Insights > Tier Planning), and consequently they show up to be down tiered. You now have the ability to ignore those volumes and not be presented with a recommendation to down tier them by clicking Exclude from Analysis.

 

 

 

If your environment changes, you can easily go back to the Tier Planning page and click Excluded tab that contains the ignored volumes, and revert it back to be included in any subsequent tier analysis by clicking Include in Analysis as shown in the figure below.

 

 

 

 

As always, Storage Insights lets you explore the product through a live demo that contains the actual product with sample data; it’s the quickest way to try out the insightful solutions. You will need an IBM ID to log in. If you do not have an IBM ID, Storage Insights provides a link for you to create one. Follow the guided tutorials for not only tier planning optimization but also troubleshooting performance, monitoring block capacity, monitoring file capacity and identifying reclaimable storage.

Another way to get fast insights into your storage environment is the free 30-day trial. Try the Storage Insights solution by using again your IBM ID, or by creating one. After the 30-day trial, you can easily convert to a subscription.

 

So click IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights now to begin your insightful journey to intelligent insights into your storage environment.

 

For continuing information on Storage Insights or IBM Spectrum Control, follow me, Bob Graczyk, on Twitter, @bobby_gratz or Linkedin.