HPE 3PAR StoreServ cloud array monitoring service

If you are a storage administrator or IT manager of an enterprise, or even a partner supporting your customer's storage, you will probably be interested in the opportunity to see what happens to your array or arrays from anywhere in the world (provided that at this point you have access to Internet). ) at any time. Not only to look, but also to get a full report on the state of the array (arrays), trends in capacity utilization and changes in performance.



HPE provides its customers and partners with this opportunity. In fact, you just have to go to the portal www.storefrontremote.com , register, register your arrays (if you are the owner of the storage system) and, if you wish, provide access to certain information about the array to your service partner. And that's all. You get at your disposal a convenient and powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing the operation of the array, and notice, completely free of charge.

Let's see what this service really gives. Upon entering, you see the main control panel with the following information:
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- The capacity of the array and the availability of free capacity;
- Efficient use of disk resources (taking into account saving disk resources through the use of technologies such as Thin Provisioning and deduplication);
- Types of drives, their quantity and disposal by capacity;
- Information on the state of the array (the presence of various kinds (Serious, Normal, Warning, Unknown) warnings);
- Array model;
- Version of the microcode.



If desired, the main panel can display basic information about array performance and deduplication efficiency, as well as historical information graphically about the change in capacity (full, allocated, virtual) with time.

Thus, you can immediately assess the presence of problems with the capacity of the array and the presence of critical problems that may require urgent response. I note that this figure shows information on a single array. With the same success, you can display information in this form simultaneously on all of your arrays.

Next, I will list some of the most interesting, from my point of view, features of this service.

• Analysis of trends in the capacity of the array. Agree, when using the Thin Provisioning technology, it is very important to know when the approximately allocated disk capacity will be equal to the physical capacity of the array.
  
  
  
  Or the same, but with a breakdown by different storage levels: SSD, NL, FC (First Class - i.e. 10k and 15k rpm disks).
  
  
• Analysis of changes in the performance of the array over time and the definition of periods of peak loads. This graph shows only the response time, similar graphs can be obtained for performance indicators such as IOPs, MB / s, queue depth, I / O size.
  
  
• Analysis of the load on different types of drives - you can see whether some drives are excessively loaded.
  
  
  

In general, do not list everything. Perhaps, I would also like to note the ability to create reports on various parameters (a small part of which was mentioned above), and reports on the selected set of parameters. Such a report may have, for example, the following content:

There may be a legitimate question: which arrays can be monitored using this service? There are only two requirements: the array must be on support and must be connected to the call-home system, which allows you to transfer array information (system health information, configuration data, performance data, system events) to HPE 3PAR Central.

In conclusion, I want to add that this service can also be used to monitor HPE StoreOnce disk libraries. Support for various storage systems by the HPE StorefrontRemote cloud service will be expanded.