Applications, departments, and general groups

Use applications and departments to organize the resources in your storage environment into a hierarchy that matches the structure of your business organization. The information can be used to view the performance of resources that belong to an application and the capacity growth of a department. Use general groups to group your resources, such as the storage systems with lease agreements that end in the current year, so that you can view information about the resources at one location in the GUI.

IBM Spectrum® Control provides storage grouping to define resources that utilize application and department business modeling. The information can be used to view the performance of resources that belong to an application and the capacity growth of a department. The pages for the monitoring and management of applications and departments are aligned with user scenarios, for example, capacity trending, resource health monitoring and performance troubleshooting

To manage and administer applications and departments, complete the following tasks:
  • Create applications and departments to model data for storage resources, allowing for enhanced capacity trending and performance troubleshooting.
  • View the status of resources that make up the applications and departments.
  • Create resource filters to automatically add resources to applications.
  • Add resources directly to applications.
  • Add applications to existing applications and departments.
  • Add departments to existing departments.
  • View subcomponent (member application) information to support hierarchical levels of storage grouping.

Applications

An application is a program or a project that consumes storage resources within an organization and interfaces with other enterprise groups that are important to the running of a business. Use IBM Spectrum Control to model the storage usage that is consumed in your environment by assigning the usage to applications to see the overall health status.

An application can be part of a department and have its own subcomponents (member applications) that are used to create a five level deep hierarchy. Applications that are grouped together can range from large line-of-business systems to specialized software, in a department, that runs on either client computers or servers. For example, an application might be an automated billing system within the Finance department, VMware running in the Information Technology department or an email marketing system that is part of the Marketing department.

The Applications page shows capacity information about the applications that are monitored by organization and interfaces with other enterprise groups that are important to the running of a business. Use IBM Spectrum Control to view and manage the resources that are defined to the applications. If the application is associated with a department, information about that department is also shown.

Departments

A department is a division within a business. Use IBM Spectrum Control to model the storage capacity that is consumed in your department for your business environment, in accordance with other department members.

A department can be hierarchical in its organizational layout. For example, a department might use 15 applications and be part of another five departments. A department might share storage resources with another department, subdepartment or an application even if they don’t belong in the same hierarchy. For example, in a collaboration scenario, a single IBM® SAN Volume Controller might be shared by multiple departments.

The Departments page shows storage capacity information about the top-level departments, the subdepartments and any applications that belong to the department that are monitored by IBM Spectrum Control.

General groups

Create general groups to quickly view information about storage resources that have common characteristics. For example, you might group the subset of ports on a SAN Volume Controller that are used for inter-node communication or the storage systems that are used by a critical business application.

You can organize your storage resources into a general group hierarchy. Organizing resources into general groups and their subgroups can be helpful when you want to quickly view information about a group of resources, but you also want to view information about subgroups of resources within the group. For example, you can group the resources that are used by your production application so that you can monitor all the application resources and separately monitor the specific subgroups of storage systems and ports.