A Single View for Managing Multi-Vendor SAN Infrastructure

Single Pane of Glass for Storage Performance, Configuration, and Capacity Information

Managing a SAN environment with a mix of storage vendors is always challenging because you have to rely on multiple tools to keep storage devices and systems functioning like they should. With a unified storage monitoring tool, you can easily identify performance bottlenecks in your storage infrastructure and take corrective actions.

A major benefit of IntelliMagic Vision is its Multi-Vendor SAN Support. One of our goals is to treat each platform like it is equally important and deserves careful attention to the nuances of that platform particularly in the area of performance management. This video demonstrates the broad range of platforms and capabilities we support.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Tim Chilton, Senior Consultant at IntelliMagic, and I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing how having all of your storage performance, configuration, and capacity information in a single pane of glass can help you be more efficient and proactive in your company.

Most storage environments these days have multiple storage array vendors, quite a few have multiple SAN switch vendors, and they also have a combination of virtual machines and physical hosts. So gathering information for performance, configuration, and capacity reporting, and doing analytics on this can often be a tedious task. You often have to have multiple windows, some CLI, some GUI that you have to gather the data from say, you may have a window for VMware, an RDP session to your physical host, SSH sessions to your storage switches and your storage arrays. These all often have to be used in order to gather the pertinent data.

You then have to somehow merge all of that information into one report. So each component may have its own reporting units, its own time zones and capabilities. This can make this a manual time consuming and error prone affair. IntelliMagic Vision automatically gathers, normalizes, and assesses the data from each device, allowing you to assess the health of each device at a glance without to manually assess each metric. IntelliMagic Vision automatically does that for you with automatically generated reports that are always up to date, accurate, and give you a single source of truth.

In this single pane of glass that IntelliMagic Vision provides, you can see across your infrastructure, allowing for easy access to capacity, configuration, and performance data for your storage arrays, your SAN attached host and your SAN fabric in an easy to consume format. This data is automatically assessed for you so you can easily see where your trouble spots lie.

For instance, if we go through and we look at Health Insights for your storage arrays, you have all the storage arrays in your environment listed here with your key performance indicators across the top and your storage arrays down the side. You can quickly, using our stoplight metaphor, assess the data so you can see that anything that’s green is good. If there was yellow on the chart, that’s warning and red is bad. You see that one of these storage arrays is having some issues with Read and Write Throughput.

Drilling into the time charts you can see which ports are causing this constraint for throughput for the storage array. And you can see quickly that there’s four ports that have more throughput than others. From there you can drill into the port itself, do an identify, and that will show you some configuration details for the port. And then from there, we can go from the storage array across the stack to look at a topology chart. So this is all of the masking views that this storage array is using to talk through that port. And these are the switches that connect those masking views to the storage array itself. Each dot and block on here are live data points. So you can go into Identify.

In this case, we’re looking at a switch port, you get your switch port configuration information and some performance analytics on there. And we do this for, as I said, you know, your SAN attached hosts. If you have an environment where you have both Cisco and Brocade SAN fabrics, we have charts here that allow you to see not only the performance across all of your different SAN fabrics and across your different SAN vendors, but also we have Health Insights charts that can show you across vendors where you’re having port errors. So this is super handy because it keeps you from having to have a different GUI or a different set of reports for your Cisco and your Brocade infrastructure.

This was just a few ways that having a single pane of glass can help you more efficiently and easily keep track of what’s going on in your environment. In part two of this two part series, we’ll discuss having a single pane of glass can help you more easily create reports and can facilitate collaboration in your environment. I hope you found this video useful, and I hope that you have a wonderful day.