EMC apps help firms to troubleshoot SANs
Automated fault management for Fibre Channel storage networks
EMC last week released two new Smarts applications designed to help IT managers troubleshoot storage area networks (SANs) and identify and model application behaviour.
The two new applications – EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability (SSIA) and EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager (SADM) – can form the basis for an enterprise-wide monitoring system, according to the firm.
Vimal Shah, EMC Smarts product marketing manager, said, “SSIA represents the formal extension of the Smarts technology to the Fibre Channel SAN. There is nobody [else] in the marketplace that provides automated fault management for the SAN.”
However, Shah said that SAN support will initially be limited to EMC systems, “The first release of the product will support Symmetrix, Clariion, Celerra NAS and iSCSI Gateways, and all the hosts and switches supported by ControlCenter 5.2. We’ll have support for non-EMC platforms either at the end of 2006 or early in 2007.”
SSIA runs on a dedicated standalone server and will extract data from ControlCenter’s repository. The SAN topology and related events are noted and the Smarts data model is applied to identify the root cause of problems.
“We will identify disk volume failure, port link failure, service processor failure, actual unit failure, HBA card failure and – probably more important to SAN infrastructure – the impact of these failures on, say, file systems, host devices, logical volumes, data movers,” commented Shah.
Both Smarts applications are available now. Storage Insight for Availability is priced according to the storage deployed, which Shah said equates to between $750 (£420) and $1,000 (£560) per terabyte.
EMC acquired privately held event-automation and real-time network systems management company Smarts in early 2005.