Technical Blog Post
Abstract
IBM Spectrum Control, V5.2.8 has arrived! Jam Packed with consumer centric functionality to enhance your storage solution!
Body
User expectations are increasing every single day. Businesses collect, store, process and use more information than ever before. At the same time, there is low tolerance for downtime, unpredictable performance, or provisioning delays. To satisfy these increased demands, organizations need more comprehensive monitoring, automation and analytics capabilities — so they can proactively resolve issues before their users are impacted.
While IBM® Spectrum Control™ continues to reduce users' storage costs and maintain a comprehensive end-to- end data and storage management solution, users asked for more environment centric improvements. In this function rich V5.2.8 release, IBM Spectrum Control listened and delivered those improvements in a big way while still maintaining their mission of simplifying your data and storage management experience.
You asked for....
• Performance monitoring enhancements for IBM Spectrum Scale™ and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
• Managed object storage systems and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
• Robust ownership for creation, definition, application, and notifications for alerts and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
• Native support for IBM FlashSystem™ 840 and 900 and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
• Enhanced pool capacity utilization reporting and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
• Managed capacity breakdown by storage system and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
• Improved dashboard, more consumer-based views with easy drill downs and IBM Spectrum Control delivered!
Well, you guessed it - IBM Spectrum Control listened and delivered....over and over again!
IBM Spectrum Control, V5.2.8 is available for download at Passport Advantage.
IBM Spectrum Scale Performance
IBM Spectrum Control extended support to achieve a complete monitoring solution for IBM Spectrum Scale. You can see the performance from the file system, to the node, to the fabric, to the SAN attached storage - performance along the entire data path. With IBM Spectrum Control, you can monitor the performance of multiple IBM Spectrum Scale clusters, so you can understand which clusters are exhibiting the most workload or getting the worst response times.
The above functionality is also available in the IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights SaaS offering. Visit the Cloud Shop, for this analytics driven data management product.
Managing object storage systems
IBM Spectrum Control has expanded the scope of what it can monitor to include object storage systems. The three core storage technologies, block, file, and now object can be monitored allowing IBM Spectrum Control to provide a storage centric view across your entire data center environment.
For example, you can see the association between object storage and the underlying IBM Spectrum Scale file system. IBM Spectrum Control extends relationships from IBM Spectrum Scale to the fabric and the SAN-attached storage that it uses. This association gives you the ability to troubleshoot along the entire data path!
The above functionality is also available in the IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights SaaS offering. Visit the Cloud Shop, for this analytics driven data management product.
Awareness of IBM FlashSystem storage systems without reliance on a virtualization layer
IBM Spectrum Control offers direct management support for IBM FlashSystem 840 and 900 storage systems among others.
You can now monitor the capacity and space usage of IBM FlashSystem 840 and 900 storage systems.
The above functionality is also available in the IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights SaaS offering. Visit the Cloud Shop, for this analytics driven data management product.
Massive Alert expansion capabilities
IBM Spectrum Control made comprehensive improvements to the overall alerting capabilities by ensuring that the alerts are actionable and meaningful within your environment. Previously there was only alerts on 3 capacity conditions. In this release, alerts are available on 53 capacity values! Now you can set up alerts on every performance metric that is captured, whereas previously it was only a subset.
You can now define alerts for all the key attributes of a resource, including attributes for status, configuration, capacity, and performance. You can use this extensive set of new alert conditions to better monitor and identify more of the critical situations in your environment.
For example, in previous versions of alerting, there were just a few capacity-related conditions for storage systems. In this release, IBM Spectrum Control has made over 50 conditions that you can alert on, including Used Capacity, Total Volume Capacity, and Available Pool Space. For performance alerts, you can now alert on any of the hundreds of metrics that are collected by IBM Spectrum Control.
To avoid receiving too many emails and disruptive notifications for some alerts, you can now choose the new suppression option:
This new option, and all the existing suppression options, are also now available for all alerts, not just performance alerts.
You can set up multiple alerts for the same attribute but with different criteria and settings. You now have the ability to duplicate that alert.
Duplicating alerts can be helpful in the following situations:
• When you want to generate separate warning alerts and critical alerts for different conditions on the same attribute.
• When you want to send alert notifications to different people based on the severity of an alert.
The following figure shows the alert definitions for the performance of a storage system port, including multiple alerts for the same metric that are triggered based on different conditions:
For more information on alert and event processing, see the IBM Knowledge Center.
Enhanced pool capacity utilization reporting
The improvements made to pool capacity reporting now enable you to understand historical utilization trends. With the new Capacity tab for pool management, you view the capacity over time and you are able to select any capacity metric and see a graph of the utilization.
To check when the available space will run out, based on the historical capacity and space usage trends for the pool, see the value that is shown in the Zero Capacity column.
You can see your Easy Tier® configuration and state information in the GUI, and validate that your Easy Tier setup is working as intended. On the Pools page and on the Volumes page, you can now see information about the capacity for each of the class drives (SSD, Nearline HDD, and Enterprise HDD), that Easy Tier can use to tier or distribute volume extents.
You can also see the distribution of the volume extents across each Easy Tier drive class or tier in the pool, such as the percentage of volume extents on SSD drives, on Enterprise HDD drives, and on Nearline HHD drives.
The above functionality is also available in the IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights SaaS offering. Visit the Cloud Shop, for this analytics driven data management product.
Managing capacity breakdown by storage system
You can now see whether the total capacity of the storage systems that you are managing exceed your licensed capacity limit. In the GUI, click Settings > Managed Capacity.
Managed capacity is the physical capacity of the storage systems that are being monitored and that is made available for storage consumption. For block storage systems, managed capacity is the physical capacity that is made available to pools. For file storage systems, managed capacity is the physical capacity that is made available to file systems. Raw disk capacity and virtual capacity are not included in the calculation of managed capacity.
The above functionality is also available in the IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights SaaS offering, go to Visit the Cloud Shop,
for this analytics driven data management product.
Updated dashboard: Faster access to critical information
IBM Spectrum Control responded to your feedback about the dashboard content from previous releases. You said it was focused primarily on infrastructure and didn’t embrace consumer- based views.
The new dashboard puts consumer views "out front" where you you can take greater advantage of them in monitoring your environment with minimal drill down.
The dashboard now supports application and department views in addition to the ever-present infrastructure items.
Some additional functionality
Here are additional functions that are contained in this release:
• SNMP Version 3 support for switches
• Inter-switch performance information
• Brocade Access Gateway switch information
• Brocade F_port trunks and NPV link information
• Easy identification of the internal resources that are encountering problems
For more information on the above-mentioned items and even more functionality, see What’s new in the IBM Knowledge Center for IBM Spectrum Control as well as the overall product documentation.
IBM Spectrum Control V5.2.8
Knowledge Center*: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS5R93_5.2.8
Storage Insights
Knowledge Center*: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSQRB8
What's new: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSQRB8/com.ibm.spectrum.si.doc/tpch_saas_r_new_in.html
*The search function in the Knowledge Centers will be fully indexed and available within the next few days.
Get engaged now!
Have a voice in the content of future releases!
The product team would love to hear feedback from you to help influence our product direction to ensure we are creating outcomes that are strategic to your business and your job.
Join the IBM Spectrum Control continuous BETA program today!
Just submit a form here: https://www-304.ibm.com/software/support/trial/cst/forms/nomination.wss?id=5405 You will hear from the BETA team with a request to sign off on the legal form for the early customer program. Once you have signed off on the legal form electronically, the BETA team will be notified and you will be contacted.
For continuing information on IBM Spectrum Control, IBM Storage Insights and the IBM Spectrum Storage family, follow me on Twitter, @bobby_gratz or Linkedin
UID
ibm16165807