Planning for Dell EMC storage systems
Dell EMC resources provide block and unified storage for organizations with network-attached storage or storage area network environments that have file and block-level services. IBM Spectrum Control provides enhanced monitoring for Unity, VMAX, VNX, and VNXe storage systems.
IBM Spectrum Control version 5.3.5 and later supports the Unity storage system by connecting directly to the device.
- VMAX family
- VNX family
- VNXe family
For other Dell EMC storage systems, monitoring is through SMI-S 1.2.
Dell EMC support page.Dell EMC Unity Device configuration
A Unity device can be added to IBM Spectrum Control as a block storage system, a file storage system, or both. When you add a Unity storage system, IBM Spectrum Control collects data by connecting directly to the storage system.
Benefits
- View detailed information about capacity, storage usage, and performance.
- Monitor health, status, and availability.
- Use alerts and alert policies to be notified of conditions and potential problems.
- Use advanced analytics to reclaim storage.
- Create and share reports about inventory, capacity, performance, and storage consumption.
Supported features
| Resource Monitoring | Features | Supported |
|---|---|---|
| Understanding the environment | Monitor storage inventory and configuration. Includes information about type, model, serial number, and firmware. |  |
| Understand storage relationships, from volume and share down to server and application. | |
|
| Explore virtualization relationships. | ||
| Explore replication relationships. | |
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| View dashboards to get insights into key aspects of your storage at a glance and one-click access to web-based element managers. | |
|
| Support for multiple protocols and storage types, such as FC, iSCSI, NVMe, CIFS, and NFS. | |
|
| Monitoring capacity | Collect storage consumption and capacity metrics. | |
| View data reduction information. | |
|
| View copy data information. | |
|
| View internal storage tiers such as Easy Tier® and EMC FAST. | |
|
| Monitor the storage consumed by applications. | |
|
| Monitoring performance | Collect performance metrics about the workload on resources. | |
| View calculated metrics to gain insights into performance conditions. | |
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| Export performance data to a compressed file. | |
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| Drill down performance workflows to troubleshoot bottlenecks. | |
|
| Compare the performance of resources. | |
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| Monitoring health | Understand the health of resources. | |
| Receive notifications when the status of a resource changes. | ||
| View the status of elements that are not represented as resources. | |
|
| Alerting | Alert on conditions within your storage environment. | |
| Define alerts to identify issues based on multiple conditions. | |
|
| Define alert policies to be notified of changes across related resources. | |
|
| Reporting | View predefined reports. | |
| View chargeback and consumer reports. | |
|
| Create custom reports by using the REST API. | |
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| Create rollup reports to view information across multiple IBM Spectrum Control servers. | |
|
| Analytics | Performance planning | |
| Capacity planning | |
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| Business impact analysis (applications, departments, and groups) | |
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| Optimize data placement with tiering | ||
| Optimize capacity with reclamation. | |
Metadata collection schedule
By default, asset, capacity, and configuration metadata is aggregated and collected daily. You can schedule daily capacity and inventory reports to gain insights about your Dell EMC storage systems.
For Dell EMC Unity storage systems, the collection intervals for performance metadata are 5 minutes and 60 minutes. The default interval is 5 minutes.
Performance metadata is collected every 15 minutes for VMAX, VNX, and VNXe block storage systems.
What's next
Before you can monitor, alert, and report on your Dell EMC storage systems, you must add them to IBM Spectrum Control.
For instructions on how to add storage systems for monitoring, see Adding storage systems.