Lord of storage
Organizations, especially large ones, often have a rather impressive storage system park, regularly updated with new and new devices. How to achieve efficient use of equipment and the most optimal allocation of disk space and resources? HewlettPackard Enterprise pays serious attention to these tasks and offers its customers software tools to solve them. For many years, Storage Essentials was offered to manage storage resources, but a couple of years ago it was replaced by HPE Storage Operations Manager, providing monitoring, inventory, and control of storage resources at a completely new quality level.
The transparency of the resources used is one of the key business requirements. Everyone knows that this is not easy to implement. For example, if we are talking about heterogeneous distributed networks, then IT specialists need to connect to several equipment control systems from different manufacturers in order to obtain a summary of the equipment available. HPE Storage Operations Manager accumulates all information at a single entry point. The second task is to regularly monitor the performance of the equipment. It can also be solved using HPE SOM, which can be integrated with the database of configuration units HPE UCMDB and the monitoring system of IT resources, but more on that below.
In general, the efficiency of using IT resources, including storage, often leaves much to be desired. For example, to implement a project, a division requests a specific set of resources and the amount of storage space. The project may fail or be delayed until better times, and unclaimed resources remain allocated to this unit. In addition, consumers of IT resources prefer to request capacity "with a reserve", not always adequately assessing the volume they need. HPE SOM will help IT administrators determine the extent to which storage resources are used, understand how they should be reallocated, and identify cases of inefficient use. For example, visual information about virtualized environments gives an idea of the amount of space spent on storing virtual machines and snapshots off, as well as the degree of oversubscription of resources.
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Is it possible to calculate the financial benefits that the customer will receive from optimizing the use of storage using HPE SOM? Of course, the situations are different, but, for example, HPE solutions allowed organizations to save up to 40% of the used disk space. It doesn't matter if it's a lot or a little. Another thing is important - we are talking about real money, which can be redirected to other projects relevant for the development of the company. Unfortunately, the most serious negative factor hindering organizations in a businesslike attitude to their resources remains the mentality. Often, consumers of IT resources deliberately do not delete unused images or virtual machines - but what if it comes in handy? Most often, it is this approach that makes it difficult to treat IT resources as a business asset that should work with 100% efficiency and bring profit, and not stand idle, taking up space, consuming electricity and disk space.
Often, organizations build their IT infrastructure in stages, acquiring solutions, including data storage systems, from different manufacturers. But all this business needs to be managed from a single console, otherwise the work of IT specialists will turn into a nightmare. HPE SOM developers are trying to support all the most popular storage systems - both their own and the hardware of Dell / EMC, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp. But even if such a storage system does not provide such support, you can quickly add it. In fact, this function is implemented using a driver, that is, a program code that “knows” how to handle a particular model, obtain data from it, and place it in the SOM. If necessary, Hewlett Packard Enterprise develops the necessary drivers in just a few weeks. Of course, the company constantly keeps abreast of the storage market, reflecting all the important trends in the SOM product development roadmap.
Adding new hardware to HPE SOM is as simple and convenient as possible. It is enough to specify the address where the new device is located, as well as the user name and password. The system will automatically scan it, get all the necessary information and start monitoring. It is important to note that the monitoring of storage systems and optical network equipment is carried out without installing any software agents. To add servers to the system can be used in two ways - agent and agentless.
Data visualization and reporting on the resources used is implemented using both dashboard dashboards and by integrating with another company solution, the HPE Operations Bridge Reporter, built on the basis of Vertica DBMS. This product collects and analyzes many different types of data and generates any reports on IT performance, as well as resource use forecasts, which allow planning equipment purchases.
Separately, I would like to talk about the integration of SOM with other HPE solutions, first of all with the base of configuration units HPE UCMDB, which we mentioned above. It downloads very detailed information about all the equipment operating in storage networks, which allows you to see the complete network topology. In turn, the HPE Operations Manager i (OMi) monitoring system, through integration with the SOM, also receives data on storage systems. As a result, the resource-service model Realtime Service Model (RTSM), which OMi builds, becomes much more efficient. In addition, all SNMP messages that signal the state of the equipment in the storage system are also transmitted from the SOM to HPE Omi, so events occurring on the storage area network are correlated with events coming to OMi from other IT infrastructure, applications and systems. management and monitoring.
As for the HPE SOM licensing types, they can be divided into two categories - full licensing, as well as licensing, which does not cover the functionality of collecting disk performance parameters. The latter type of license is aimed at those who need to carry out only inventory of equipment and control the use of resources. The licensing unit is the number of optical ports of the equipment, not terabytes of disk space, which is beneficial for the organization. In addition, in the event of a hardware upgrade, the license may be transferred from the old device to a new one. For those who have not yet made a final decision on the purchase of HPE SOM, its trial full-featured version is available, which can be used for 90 days.
So, from the implementation of HPE Storage Operations Manager, organizations receive several advantages: firstly, an understanding of the current state and configurations of existing equipment; secondly, reducing operating costs and maintaining devices in working condition; thirdly, increased availability of applications and infrastructure, as well as accelerated troubleshooting. Business leaders, in turn, have the opportunity not only to control the use of resources, but also to plan further business development.
The transparency of the resources used is one of the key business requirements. Everyone knows that this is not easy to implement. For example, if we are talking about heterogeneous distributed networks, then IT specialists need to connect to several equipment control systems from different manufacturers in order to obtain a summary of the equipment available. HPE Storage Operations Manager accumulates all information at a single entry point. The second task is to regularly monitor the performance of the equipment. It can also be solved using HPE SOM, which can be integrated with the database of configuration units HPE UCMDB and the monitoring system of IT resources, but more on that below.
In general, the efficiency of using IT resources, including storage, often leaves much to be desired. For example, to implement a project, a division requests a specific set of resources and the amount of storage space. The project may fail or be delayed until better times, and unclaimed resources remain allocated to this unit. In addition, consumers of IT resources prefer to request capacity "with a reserve", not always adequately assessing the volume they need. HPE SOM will help IT administrators determine the extent to which storage resources are used, understand how they should be reallocated, and identify cases of inefficient use. For example, visual information about virtualized environments gives an idea of the amount of space spent on storing virtual machines and snapshots off, as well as the degree of oversubscription of resources.
')
Is it possible to calculate the financial benefits that the customer will receive from optimizing the use of storage using HPE SOM? Of course, the situations are different, but, for example, HPE solutions allowed organizations to save up to 40% of the used disk space. It doesn't matter if it's a lot or a little. Another thing is important - we are talking about real money, which can be redirected to other projects relevant for the development of the company. Unfortunately, the most serious negative factor hindering organizations in a businesslike attitude to their resources remains the mentality. Often, consumers of IT resources deliberately do not delete unused images or virtual machines - but what if it comes in handy? Most often, it is this approach that makes it difficult to treat IT resources as a business asset that should work with 100% efficiency and bring profit, and not stand idle, taking up space, consuming electricity and disk space.
Often, organizations build their IT infrastructure in stages, acquiring solutions, including data storage systems, from different manufacturers. But all this business needs to be managed from a single console, otherwise the work of IT specialists will turn into a nightmare. HPE SOM developers are trying to support all the most popular storage systems - both their own and the hardware of Dell / EMC, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp. But even if such a storage system does not provide such support, you can quickly add it. In fact, this function is implemented using a driver, that is, a program code that “knows” how to handle a particular model, obtain data from it, and place it in the SOM. If necessary, Hewlett Packard Enterprise develops the necessary drivers in just a few weeks. Of course, the company constantly keeps abreast of the storage market, reflecting all the important trends in the SOM product development roadmap.
Adding new hardware to HPE SOM is as simple and convenient as possible. It is enough to specify the address where the new device is located, as well as the user name and password. The system will automatically scan it, get all the necessary information and start monitoring. It is important to note that the monitoring of storage systems and optical network equipment is carried out without installing any software agents. To add servers to the system can be used in two ways - agent and agentless.
Data visualization and reporting on the resources used is implemented using both dashboard dashboards and by integrating with another company solution, the HPE Operations Bridge Reporter, built on the basis of Vertica DBMS. This product collects and analyzes many different types of data and generates any reports on IT performance, as well as resource use forecasts, which allow planning equipment purchases.
Separately, I would like to talk about the integration of SOM with other HPE solutions, first of all with the base of configuration units HPE UCMDB, which we mentioned above. It downloads very detailed information about all the equipment operating in storage networks, which allows you to see the complete network topology. In turn, the HPE Operations Manager i (OMi) monitoring system, through integration with the SOM, also receives data on storage systems. As a result, the resource-service model Realtime Service Model (RTSM), which OMi builds, becomes much more efficient. In addition, all SNMP messages that signal the state of the equipment in the storage system are also transmitted from the SOM to HPE Omi, so events occurring on the storage area network are correlated with events coming to OMi from other IT infrastructure, applications and systems. management and monitoring.
As for the HPE SOM licensing types, they can be divided into two categories - full licensing, as well as licensing, which does not cover the functionality of collecting disk performance parameters. The latter type of license is aimed at those who need to carry out only inventory of equipment and control the use of resources. The licensing unit is the number of optical ports of the equipment, not terabytes of disk space, which is beneficial for the organization. In addition, in the event of a hardware upgrade, the license may be transferred from the old device to a new one. For those who have not yet made a final decision on the purchase of HPE SOM, its trial full-featured version is available, which can be used for 90 days.
So, from the implementation of HPE Storage Operations Manager, organizations receive several advantages: firstly, an understanding of the current state and configurations of existing equipment; secondly, reducing operating costs and maintaining devices in working condition; thirdly, increased availability of applications and infrastructure, as well as accelerated troubleshooting. Business leaders, in turn, have the opportunity not only to control the use of resources, but also to plan further business development.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/313672/
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