IBM Storage Insights

IBM® Storage Insights is a cloud-based service that allows you to analyze, protect, and optimize your storage infrastructure.

You can integrate IBM Storage Virtualize systems with IBM Storage Insights by using Call Home with cloud services or by installing lightweight applications that are called data collectors into your storage environment. The ability to register and connect to IBM Storage Insights is integrated with the management GUI or command-line interface on your IBM Storage Virtualize system so that you can configure it at any time.

To help you monitor a storage system, IBM Storage Insights collects status, configuration, capacity, and performance metadata about its managed disks (MDisks), volumes and volume copies, nodes, drives, and other resources. This metadata includes statistics and other information that's used for analysis, troubleshooting, and viewing in dashboards, charts, and reports.

A key part of monitoring your system includes the detection of potential ransomware attacks. To ensure that, you have the latest storage metadata for detecting those types of attacks, compression and cyber resiliency statistics for volumes are collected every 5 minutes. With these statistics, IBM Storage Insights builds a historical model of a storage system and uses its built-in intelligence and formulas to identify when and where ransomware attacks might be occurring. For more information on statistics, refer Cyber resilience.

There are two versions of the IBM Storage Insights service: IBM Storage Insights and IBM Storage Insights Pro. IBM Storage Insights is available at no cost if you own IBM Block Storage. With this version, you can monitor the basic health, status, and performance of various storage resources.

IBM Storage Insights Pro is a subscription-based product that provides a more comprehensive view of the performance, capacity, and health of your storage resources. In addition to the features offered by IBM Storage Insights, IBM Storage Insights Pro provides tools for intelligent capacity planning, storage reclamation, storage tiering, and performance troubleshooting services. Together, these features can help you reduce storage costs and optimize your data center.

To use Call Home with cloud services, ensure you have the following set up:
  1. System memory requirement: Ensure that your storage system has at least 128 GB of system memory to support integrated IBM Storage Insights.
  2. IBMid: Ensure that you have an IBMid. You can create an IBM account here Create an IBMid.
  3. IBM Storage Insights registration: Register for the IBM Storage Insights service at https://ibm.biz/register.
  4. Service name: Create a unique name for your IBM Storage Insights service. To ensure that the name is unique, you can use your company name and another identifying feature, such as a location or department. For example, Bank Texas or Insurance Company Accounting.
For more information about collecting metadata in IBM Storage Insights, see the following topics: