Today, more enterprises are adopting a multi-vendor storage strategy to meet their exploding storage requirements. Why? Because introducing a second storage vendor helps companies get the best prices from the vendors and thereby reduces total cost of ownership by at least 15% to 25% over a five-year time frame, according to Gartner. Moreover, enterprises look for multi-vendor systems when a single vendor cannot cater to all their storage needs.
The rise of multi-vendor storage, however, is a double-edged sword. For instance, assume you have a heterogeneous storage environment with five Qlogic SAN boxes 5600, two Qlogic SAN boxes 9200AE, four Brocade blade farm switches, and four IBM System X 3650 servers.
Isolating a particular performance bottleneck in that environment would mean juggling several vendors’ management tools. Do they help isolate the issue? No. Even with those separate tools, you would never be able to isolate the layer with the issue, e.g., the RAID, switch, or server layer.
Managing systems in a multi-vendor storage environment can be a nightmare. With different vendors supplying different device types, each with different attributes, a new set of integration and monitoring challenges emerge. So how do you overcome the multi-vendor challenges and reclaim your peace of mind?
Take back control with ManageEngine OpStor
OpStor is a multi-vendor storage resource management software that can be used in heterogeneous storage environments. This tool can monitor storage area networks (SANs) and network attached storage (NAS) devices such as storage arrays and tape libraries, network devices like fabric switches along with host servers and host bus adapters cards from a multitude of vendors.
Once installed, OpStor automatically discovers your entire storage real estate. Imagine visualizing your entire storage environment on a single console instead of mapping it manually using configuration tables. OpStor displays a map that lets you see all the storage devices connected in your network. This map dramatically reduces reaction time to resolve storage system panics as isolating an issue between the application layer and the storage devices can now be done easily. After discovering the storage environment for the example mentioned earlier, the OpStor map will look like this:
You can start by checking the IBM System X 3650 server (Host servers) for CPU and memory performance then move to Brocade blade farm switch (Fabric Switches) to check for throughput and bandwidth issues and then to the Qlogic SAN boxes (Storage Devices) for LUN utilization issues to come to a conclusion, all with a single tool. The color-coded interconnections will help you identify problems and down devices at a glance. So you can directly check different devices, debug and isolate issues down to the individual port of a switch.
Storage outages will be a thing of the past as OpStor helps you forecast the storage demand apart from generating detailed reports on asset, capacity, performance, and configuration information of storage devices and their components. Performance reports give you the devices’ uptime and downtime stats, which help you keep your data secure, i.e., available and backed up.
Store well with OpStor
OpStor has some unique advantages, too. It captures sensor faults such as power supply, temperature, fan and battery, as well as status change notifications. So if a particular FC switch is not performing at optimum levels, you can get its temperature or power supply information to isolate the problem creating the performance drop. This means that apart from monitoring asset and performance parameters, you can also monitor the health of your devices.
How come system panics happen only at the worst times like when you are stuck in traffic jam or are on a plane? OpStor helps you prepare for those scenarios by letting you set custom thresholds on devices’ performance parameters, which can trigger alarms and send notifications. OpStor even lets you notify the administrator in charge when you are not able to respond. So no matter where you are, OpStor keeps you in control.
And you need not use different tools for application or network management. OpStor can be integrated with different ManageEngine products, so you can manage your entire IT from a single console.
Armed with these features that put you in total control of your storage infrastructure, OpStor emerges as a must-have product for the storage admin of the future. So go ahead and get the 21-day trial pack to experience OpStor yourself.
For an overview of OpStor, check out the slideshow below:
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The original article/video can be found at Take Control of Multi-Vendor Storage Environments with ManageEngine OpStor