Test Results: ViPR Monitoring and Reporting

Recently,Principled Technologies (PT), a leader in fact-based technology assessments, conducted a hands-on evaluation of ViPR involving a series of use-case scenarios, including storage automation and provisioning, monitoring and reporting, VMware integration, and object services.  The results of this testing have been published by PT in the report “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014). To acquaint you with the report and the hard facts within, we’ll publish a series of excerpts over the next few weeks.

Monitoring and Reporting

In this excerpt, we’ll look at the test results for ViPR monitoring and reporting:

“The EMC ViPR solution is more than just the base installation. Organizations can take advantage of plugins, extensions, and management packs to add ViPR functionality into management tools already deployed in datacenters. For example, the ViPR monitoring and reporting SolutionPack delivered with ViPR allows administrators to get a complete in-depth picture of the health, capacity, and availability of the storage arrays attached to ViPR. Figure 11 shows an example of the ViPR monitoring views.

Figure 11: The ViPR SolutionPack allows administrators to view events, capacity, and system health information.

Another advantage of using ViPR plugins in existing management applications is its ability to generate customized reports administrators can use to maintain documentation on their environments over time. Organizational management may use other specialized reports to guide purchasing and for developing strategies for meeting their customers’ needs while expanding their customer base. Figure 12 shows how easy it is to export a report with the ViPR reporting mechanism. See Appendix L for a sample report.

The EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite [now ViPR SRM] is a feature-rich application suite designed to allow storage administrators to “visualize, analyze, and optimize" their storage environments. The ViPR Solution Pack bundled with the ViPR Controller provides some of these advanced enterprise features as part of the base ViPR package. The ViPR SolutionPack can be augmented by adding [ViPR SRM], which provides enhanced capacity planning and management with consistency for the entire ViPR-supported and legacy storage environment.”

For more detailed information about the hands-on testing of ViPR monitoring and reporting, please see the section about Monitoring and Reporting (pages 12-15) and Appendix L – Sample ViPR Report (page 57) in the report “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014).