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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Welcome to Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite Fundamentals.
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1 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This course covers an introduction to the Storage Resource
Management Suite including an overview of the challenges storage
managers face, the architecture of SRM, and the features that help
SRM satisfy the needs of the storage manager.
2 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module introduces the challenges and business propositions
that drive the use of the SRM Suite, including identification of
some important use cases and the benefits derived from the depth of
funcitonality that comprises the SRM Suite.
3 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Our world is changing fast and datacenter innovations are
rapidly falling behind. New web based applications and technologies
are driving new revenue streams. With advances in mobile computing,
end users now expect to consume a wide range of content and
applications from both personal, as well as corporate issued
devices, at anytime day or night. Organizations also expect new
applications to drive new business outcomes. More information about
customers likes and preferences must be captured and mined. By
2020, the data managed by enterprises is expected to grow to over
40 Zeta Bytes. New customer engagement models have evolved, setting
expectations that applications will be easily accessible via the
internet and always available. As a result, IT must maintain
increasing service levels at lower costs, and bring new services
on-line faster just to meet these new business expectations.
4 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Rapid data growth combined with increased service level
expectations introduces new management challenges. Continuously
evolving IT environments frequently lead to orphaned or under
utilized storage resources. Rapid adoption of virtualization and
cloud technologies have reduced visibility into service
dependencies, health, and performance. IT frequently lacks the
ability to quickly understand who is using capacity, how much they
are using, if the right tier of service level is being used, and
when more resources will be required. The traditional silo forms of
infrastructure management lead to higher capital and operational
costs, often resulting in too much time being spent with lengthy
problem resolution times.
5 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
In order to meet these new challenges, IT must transform the way
they deliver services. This includes storage management. EMC
recommends three steps for transforming storage services. First, is
to automate the delivery of storage services based on defined
policies. This will enable IT to lower operational costs, eliminate
human error, consistently align with design best practices, and
roll out new services faster. Second, is to implement an extensible
and open management framework that enables IT to optimize existing
investments while supporting software defined storage in the
future. Third, IT must implement a monitoring solution that
provides visibility across compute, network, and storage domains
that allows organizations to quickly identify problems and assess
business impact. These three steps provide IT with a simpler,
scalable, storage management solution.
6 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
IT managers generally have three key concerns when managing IT
infrastructure: meeting SLAs, controlling costs, and increasing
business agility. Meeting SLAs requires the ability to understand
end-to-end relationships and service dependencies. It also requires
insight into end-to-end performance trends and compliance with
configuration best practices and interoperability guidelines to
ensure the environment is always configured correctly to meet
service levels. Controlling costs requires the ability to identify
under-utilized resources and track capacity consumption trends to
improve capacity planning. Enhancing business agility means rolling
out new applications and solving problems faster. When discussing
the SRM Suite, you can catagorize these features into three general
areas: Visualize, Analyze, and Optimize.
7 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite is a solution that is specifically designed to
meet the challenges unique to managing the IT infrastructure. The
SRM Suite enables our customers to visualize application to storage
dependencies and performance, analyze configurations and capacity
growth, and optimize their environment to improve return on
investments. This allows our customers to address many of today's
common management issues from a common presentation layer and
reporting application. Throughout the remainder of this course, we
will take a look at how this applies to some common use cases such
as performance reporting and analysis, capacity planning and
reporting, chargeback reporting, configuration compliance
monitoring, and multi-tenant SLA reporting.
8 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite provides enterprise views of the storage
environment enabling enhanced decision making and operational
control, driving efficiency, and improving service levels. The
storage resource management shared principles are to:
1. Enable collaboration of Storage Administration functions with
data center teams for better planning, business insight, and
automation. 2. Expose key performance indicators, configuration
information, and storage capacity analysis data to enable
cross-domain consistency. 3. Simplify and increase ease of use of
EMC products through the adoption of the EMC Common User Experience
(ECUE). 4. Extend broad platform coverage via a set of standard
interfaces to discover hosts, switches, and storage arrays
regardless of vendor.
9 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite provides customers with comprehensive end-to-end
analysis and reporting in heterogeneous environments for compute,
network, and storage. The total solution begins with discovery of
topology and extraction of configuration data to determine and map
relationships for supported devices. Polling of devices in the
topology is established to gather data to provide performance,
availability, and capacity management. Comparison of results to
rule based policies can then be used to report on compliance to
best practices, mandatory requirements, and the EMC support matrix.
Reports include alerts when policy requirements are breached.
10 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite supports EMC storage, third-party storage, and a
comprehensive set of operating systems with PowerPath and Vblock
converged infrastructures. Support in the SRM Suite extends to
Cisco and Brocade SAN switches, Oracle and SQL Server database
applications, and powerful platforms such as ViPR, DPA, and Virtual
Wisdom.
11 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
EMC offers three powerful solutions to help customers simplify
storage management. EMCs SRM Suite provides a comprehensive set of
tools for storage teams to optimize their environment while meeting
service level agreements. The Service Assurance Suite extends
visibility to the compute and network domains, enabling IT
operations teams to manage service levels and optimize resources.
ViPR adds software-defined storage that offers a revolutionary
approach to storage automation and management to transform existing
heterogeneous physical storage into a simple, extensible, and open
virtual storage platform. ViPR automates storage provisioning
through policy based, self-service access to these virtual storage
arrays. Combined with the SRM Suite, it centralizes storage
management across all physical and virtual storage environments
that includes both EMC and third party storage arrays. The SRM
Suite, Service Assurance Suite, and ViPR share a common
presentation layer and reporting environment to further simplify
storage management and reporting.
12 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module covered some of the challenges facing management and
the benefits derived from use of an integrated, end-to-end
host-to-storage management solution. Highlighted are some of the
use cases that the SRM Suite addresses and a discussion of how the
SRM Suite is used to achieve total storage configuration
management.
13 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module focuses on an overview of the architecture, key
terminology, and components of the SRM Suite.
14 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite is by default, an agentless application using
various methods to collect data from the underlying infrastructure
it discovers. The architecture of the SRM Suite is comprised of
three components and described at a high level:
The SRM Frontend web portal is a virtual machine providing the
end user interface for alert management, viewing performance
metrics, viewing storage capacity information, and running
reports.
The Backend is a virtual machine used to store data received
from the collectors. This data includes events, compliance,
topology, and metric information. Backends are categorized as
Primary or Additional. Each instance of SRM may only have one
Primary Backend. The Primary Backend has unique modules to handle
alerts, topology mapping of SAN objects, and load balancing. The
additional Backends share the load of processing data from the
collectors in heavily loaded systems.
SRM collectors retrieve information about applications, SAN
objects, and connectivity in the datacenter and send it to the
backend for storage in the database. The Frontend will pull data
stored in the Backend database and display it in the GUI for the
end user.
The SRM Suite architecture provides data for various use cases
of storage management across various switches, hosts, and arrays in
the SAN. This includes EMC arrays, third party arrays, and
visibility through the VMware environment up to the application
stack.
15 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite is made of several components, called modules,
that work together to collect data from the network infrastructure,
process the data, and display reports to the users. Depending on
the environment, the SRM Suite can be scaled with additional
modules in a variety of configurations. To collect the data inside
a Collector-Manager, there are discrete collectors that can handle
a specific type of polling (SNMP, XML, REST, TXT, VMware, and
Smarts, etc). The collectors periodically poll and connect to
devices to collect data, filter and or enrich the data, and pass
the data on to the backend. The APG-Backend processes the data,
computes aggregates where necessary, and maintains the database.
The database receives the processed data, places it in the
appropriate storage location, and stores the metric properties for
retrieval. The SRM web portal is used to log into the application
and provides administrative access, report generation and creation,
and data retrieval.
Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
16
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
SRM may be installed using an ovf file or a binary file. The ovf
install option contains and deploys a 64-bit hardened version of
SuSe Linux on each virtual machine deployed in the vApp. This
version of the Linux operating environment is scanned, cleaned, and
maintained by EMC. There is a template that is used with the ovf
installation that assists the installer with critical information
that must be supplied to the application to ensure its ability to
function properly once the deployment is complete. Although, ovf
deployments permit either 1 or 4 virtual machines to be created at
deployment time, single virtual machine installs are useful in
small sites or for proof of concept activities.
Four virtual machine deployments are managed by a virtual
appliance and will consist of the Frontend, Primary Backend,
additional Backend, and Collector SRM components. Four virtual
machine deployments are made in larger scale deployments and are
useful for Enterprise environments. However, if a vApp deployment
needs to be extended in a large environment, additional single
virtual machine installs can be added as additional Backends to the
instance scaling the deployment to a satisfactory level.
The binary installation is a more flexible environment when
compared to ovf deployments. There are a greater number of
supported platforms and no hard limit on the number of virtual
machines that can be deployed, but a binary deployment requires
more support and maintenance from the customer. The customer must
provide the operating system for the application. There are a
limited number of Operating Systems that SRM is currently
supporting and the support matrix for the product should be checked
to ensure that any intended deployment will be on a supported
platform. The customer is also responsible for maintenance activity
such as patch updates, virus detection, and vulnerability
management to ensure that the SRM application will not experience
unexpected downtime or errors due to poor maintenance after the
installation is complete. Although a binary installation permits
any number of virtual machines to be included in a deployment, only
one Frontend, one Primary Backend, and one Collector may be
installed per deployment. To scale out the installation, any number
of Additional Backends may then be installed in the deployment
using the binary deployment model. It should be noted that only
binary deployments are used for upgrades.
17 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module covered the SRM Suite application including the
architecture and primary functionality of the virtual machines and
components that make up the application. Options for installation
of the application were also covered in this module.
18 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module focuses on describing the key features and
capabilities of the SRM Suite and identifying how those features
may be used in an infrastructure management environment.
19 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Performance and availability analysis spans from the
application, in this case an Oracle database, to the virtual or
physical host, through the SAN switches and down into the array. No
other vendor provides this breadth of coverage with a completely
agent-less solution. The SRM Suite provides detailed topology and
relationship views to help understand the service dependencies and
to reduce time spent on planning and trouble-shooting
processes.
It also provides comprehensive end-to-end representation of the
infrastructure and analysis of performance, health, and
availability with the goal of improved service level compliance and
administrative productivity. This level of visibility,
predominately provided through storage reporting with customizable
reports through the user interface, has become a necessity for
assuring service levels in todays rapidly growing and increasingly
complex environments.
20 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
More than half of all SAN outages are due to configuration
errors. The SRM Suite Storage Compliance solution pack continuously
monitors compliance with your design best practices and the EMC
Support Matrix to avoid costly down time and reduce the time spent
planning and managing changes to the environment. SRM storage
compliance enables you to proactively identify configuration issues
that can impact services and ensure your SAN is always configured
correctly to meet your required service levels.
21 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The Storage Compliance solution pack addresses storage
configuration compliance and change management challenges. It
performs change tracking, best practice validation, and checks
interoperability standards of the SAN against the EMC support
matrix using agent-less discovery to simplify management and reduce
deployment times. When SAN changes breach configuration policies,
the violation is noted by the SRM Suite. The count and severity of
these rule breaches is presented in the SRM Suite user interface.
SRM Suite storage compliance proactively detects infrastructure
vulnerabilities to assure customers they will maintain compliance
with internal configuration policies, vendor guidelines, and
industry best practices. Storage Compliance further minimizes
operational costs by reducing time spent on resolving configuration
issues and downtime associated with human error.
22 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite helps you analyze capacity growth to control costs
with reporting that extends across data center sites and
heterogeneous storage environments. For EMC VMAX and VNX arrays,
you can define service levels based on array model type, disk
interface technology, RAID type, disk size, or FAST policy. The SRM
Suite enables you to track the true cost of supporting an
application by allowing you to group hosts by application or
department and discover all primary volumes for those hosts
including their snaps and replicas.
23 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite helps improve FAST policy decisions. You can view
the service-level or FAST policy for each LUN attached to a host
and analyze the historical throughput, response time, and IOs per
second to determine if you have selected the right service level.
By analyzing these performance trends, you can identify the
application storage and investigate the possibility of moving one
or more LUNs to lower cost storage without violating SLAs. If the
investigation shows that one or more LUNs could be migrated, then
review the Service Level Capacity report to determine if enough
storage space is available in the target tier.
24 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Chargeback reports are an effective means of aligning the cost
of service delivery with business requirements. After all, people
generally want the highest level of service until they have to pay
for it. Having the ability to quickly identify the cost of
delivering storage services, enables organizations to make better
decisions on service-level requirements.
For example, chargeback reports can be created inside the SRM
Suite user interface using data acquired from storage reports
showing business units with aggregate capacity based on application
or department use. Chargeback reporting then breaks down each class
of service to show the total cost of supporting an application or
department including all copies and snapshots.
25 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite's custom reporting allows you to visualize,
analyze, and optimize multi-tenant infrastructures by quickly
creating reports for different clients, users, and roles. Through
the user interface component, employing an HTML 5 multi-tenant user
interface, creates unique views accessible on a wide range of
modern communication devices.
26 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module covered a discussion of the key features and
capabilities of the SRM Suite and identification of their usage and
the components that support use in an IT infrastructure.
27 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module focuses on a description of how to use the SRM Suite
to manage a datacenter infrastructure.
28 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
What if you could do the following?
Understand ALL storage relationships, dependencies, and
application impacts.
Assure storage related service level agreements and Chargeback
for those services.
Optimize storage investments to control costs and improve
productivity. The SRM Suite can help achieve solutions to these
common infrastructure management challenges.
Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Problem - A storage administrator needs to add new capacity to a
host supporting a production application. Discovering what
service-level the host is using, which LUNs and arrays the
application resides on, and if there is enough capacity in that
service-level on the array to meet the administrators requirements
can take hours of analysis.
Solution - The SRM Suite provides end-to-end views that help
administrators quickly identify the relationships between
applications and the storage services they live on. It also reports
on host capacity by service level to quickly identify the class of
service used to support an application. The SRM Suite will also
help administrators quickly find storage pools of the right
capacity that meet defined service-levels to support new
application requirements.
Value - Automating the key processes of identifying end-to-end
relationships, the type of storage being used, and the available
capacity that meets service-level requirements reduces the time it
takes to complete these tasks from hours down to just a few
minutes.
30 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Problem - Frequently, hosts share and compete for resources such
as bandwidth from a switch or IO for a group of disks. As the
workloads from an application increase, it can impact other
applications that share these resources. Our customers tell us that
identifying the applications contending for resources and all of
the impacted applications can often times take days to weeks.
Solution - The SRM Suite provides analysis that allows you to
quickly spot bottlenecks in a data path. It also enables you to
quickly identify which hosts share what resources and to analyze
the associated workloads to identify possible overloading of a
shared resource. With this analysis you can be more proactive in
distributing the load more evenly to avoid bottlenecks.
Value - Automating the key processes for identifying end-to-end
relationships, bottlenecks, and contributors to those bottlenecks
reduces the time it takes to troubleshoot performance issues from
hours and weeks to minutes and hours. The ability to more
effectively distribute workloads improves your ability to assure
service levels.
31 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Problem - While virtual or thin provisioning helps improve
storage utilization by allocating capacity on demand from common
pools, this common pool is typically oversubscribed, meaning that
more capacity is allocated to hosts than is actually available
within the pool. Since most hosts use less capacity than actually
allocated, thin provisioning improves data storage utilization.
However, application outages can occur if the thin pool runs out of
capacity and an application attempts to write new data to it. While
thin provisioning can improve utilization and delay new capacity
purchases until more capacity is required, it also must be managed
to ensure the thin pool does not run out of capacity to avoid
unplanned outages.
Solution - The SRM Suite tracks capacity consumption for thin
pools and RAID groups across all discovered arrays and data
centers. Utilization is shown with red and yellow indicators to
identify when user defined thresholds are exceeded and to quickly
spot pools running out of capacity. Green indicators show that
consumption levels are currently safe.
For each Storage Pool, SRM predicts The number of days until
full to identify when new capacity will be required. And, it shows
the array name and disk type for that pool so you can quickly
determine where, what type, and when new capacity will be
required.
Value - Automated tracking of pool and RAID group consumption
simplifies the management of thin pools to improve productivity and
create broader use of thin provisioning to improve capacity
utilization and lower capital expenses. It also improves capacity
planning by enabling just in time purchasing to reduce acquisition
and operational costs.
32 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
As you increase your use of virtual provisioning to improve
utilization, the SRM Suite helps you track pool utilization trends
to identify when pools will become full. Fully Automated Storage
Tiering (FAST) and FAST for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) will enable you
to identify capacity mix by storage group to improve SLA support
through FAST policy decisions. The SRM Suite can track capacity
consumption by storage tier to identify when new capacity will be
needed by a tier to improve capacity planning processes. The SRM
Suite dashboard takes you through a flow of analysis in support of
capacity planning to determine:
What is the my raw capacity? How did I configure usable space?
Of the usable space, how much is used, how much is free, and how
is
capacity changing over time? For the capacity being used, how is
it being used? The dashboard can show
usage by Service Level, by Purpose, etc. Are there any
conditions that I need to be aware of? For example, are
there storage pools that are close to running low or are out of
space?
33 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
With the SRM Suite, you can view a report that proactively
identifies SLAs at risk as well as those that have failed and
require immediate action.
34 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Assure storage SLAs by analyzing storage consumption and
trending in service level capacities to deliver storage service
levels that are aligned with application requirements. For example,
assure the FAST VP service level is available for allocation to
higher priority applications. If this service level is fully used,
a service level with devices that are compatible with the
application I/O demand may be used to service the application. A
good choice could be the silver service level which contains high
capacity, fast, and reliable Fiber Channel devices. The benefit of
having the data displayed in these reports is that the end user is
able to have a single view with two tables yielding all the
necessary information to assure storage SLAs through capacity
planning, resolving capacity issues, and identifying potential or
current performance bottlenecks.
35 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The SRM Suite can be used to search and view topology from the
host through the intervening infrastructure and into the storage
topology itself using the SRM Suite topology map utility. We can
see there is only one data path on an ESX server which seems odd
for a virtual machine host of an Oracle database. When we look at
the performance graph for this host, we can see some spikes which
may explain why the Oracle instance is experiencing difficulties.
Investigating this ESX Server configuration within the Storage
Compliance component of the SRM Suite, shows us that this
configuration is in violation of a multi-path policy. The I/O Path
Redundancy rule for this policy requires at least two paths for the
server. Now that we have identified the potential issue for our
Oracle instance, we can remediate the situation.
36 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Keep in mind, when charging for storage services, you need to
identify the true cost of application storage. To help with
understanding storage usage, map it to Service Levels appropriate
for the application. It is important to understand the range of
relationships from storage to the hosts or clusters. In this
example, how would you charge for the data storage consumed by the
application? Consider the following:
Snapshots support the application directly, so they should be
charged to the application.
Local copies for application backup should be charged to the
application owner, not the backup server, despite mapping.
A local copy for development servers should probably be charged
to the application as well.
Remote copies should be charged to the application too, since
they will be used in the event of an outage to recover the
application remotely.
With the SRM Suite, you can determine all the supporting copies,
even if they are mapped/masked to a different server (like the
backup server). Total chargeback for the application storage should
include all of this capacity.
37 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This module covered the use of the SRM Suite to meet some of the
challenges facing management. Highlighted is an analysis of the use
cases that the SRM Suite fulfills including understanding
relationships and dependencies between storage and applications,
dealing with SLAs and chargeback requirements, and optimizing the
infrastructure to control costs and improve productivity.
38 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals
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Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
This course covered an introduction to the challenges and
business propositions that drive the use of the SRM Suite. We
identified some important use cases and the benefits derived from
the combination of components that make up the SRM Suite. This
course also included an overview of the SRM Suites architecture,
features, and functionality.
39 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals