Connecting the Scattered Pieces for Storage Reporting

An accurate, timely, and comprehensive storage reporting mechanism is key to measuring performance and utilization of a large storage infrastructure. Storage reporting is also crucial for measuring the business value of the investments in storage equipment by associating storage costs to different application and business units.

Producing a meaningful report for senior IT management requires correlating some amount of company-specific information into storage reports. However, most storage reporting tools do not provide functionality to include customized data inputs. Consequently, storage administrators struggle to produce these reports manually at a regular interval while ensuring accuracy and timeliness of such reports.

Although essential elements for a comprehensive storage report are available, they are scattered around different places or tools. What’s needed is a way to connect them and provide different dimensions for storage reporting, e.g. from a project/business line perspective, a server/application perspective and, of course, a traditional storage array perspective.

To produce these correlated reports, a scalable and robust configuration repository is required as the foundation to all of the above.

In this Knowledge Sharing article, Hok Pui Chan uses a Symmetrix VMAX SAN infrastructure to illustrate the technical details of extracting, processing, and storing source data into the configuration repository and how to produce the reports. Examples of these technical details include:

• What and how can VMAX information be extracted?

• How can the information be transformed and imported into the configuration repository?

• What kind of reports are useful specific to a VMAX environment?

Hok also discusses other practical considerations and opportunities for future extension. This article provides ideas and technical details on how to build a storage configuration repository and reporting facilities.

Read the full article.