Test Results: ViPR Storage Automation and Provisioning

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.

Storage Automation and Provisioning

In this excerpt, we’ll look at the test results for block storage automation and provisioning:

“We tested the ability of a customer to use ViPR to provision block storage and prepare it on the target Windows host compared to performing those same tasks manually. We captured the time and steps required to perform those tasks using each method, and compared the results.

As Figure 5 shows, compared to the manual approach on both VMAX and VNX, using ViPR to provision block storage reduced the number of steps by up to 76.1 percent and reduced time by up to 86.5 percent.

See Appendix E for the methodology we used to perform this test.

Provision block storage	Number of admin   steps	ViPR reduced   steps by…	Admin time (mm:ss)	ViPR reduced   time by…
ViPR	11		00:44
Manual - VMAX	46	76.1%	05:27	86.5%
Manual - VNX	37	70.3%	02:49	74.0%

With ViPR, it takes less time and fewer steps to perform the provisioning test we executed. Because it can interact with a storage system, a fabric manager, and a host directly—and work across physical IT infrastructure from end-to-end, ViPR was able to automatically provision block storage, perform the necessary SAN zoning required to present the new storage to the host, and mount and format the new storage for use on a Windows host. The automation is so simple and complete that a non-administrative customer with access to the ViPR console could perform this function with no administrative assistance.

Compare that with the manual methods, which would require at least one storage administrator to provision the storage and perform the storage network changes. In larger organizations, one would expect to have the request accepted by a customer service specialist, a change control item created, management approval required, storage administrators to create the storage, network managers to perform the changes, host administrators to discover and format the storage, and potential delays during quality control and hand-off phases. In short, ViPR required less time and effort to execute a sequence of tasks than the manual process did; in a real-world situation, ViPR could certainly help circumvent unnecessary delays and reduce administrative burden.“

Source: “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014).

For more detailed information about the hands-on testing of ViPR storage automation and provisioning, please see the section about Provisioning (pages 8-12) and Appendix E - Provisioning Block Storage (pages 33-35) and Appendix F - Provisioning File Storage (pages 36-37) in the report “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014).