Product overview

IBM Spectrum® Control provides a set tools for managing storage capacity, availability, alerts, events, performance, and resources. It can reduce the complexity of managing a storage environment by centralizing, simplifying, and optimizing storage tasks that are associated with storage systems, storage networks, performance troubleshooting, and capacity management.

IBM Spectrum Control can help you detect potential problems on your storage devices. For example, it can notify you when a server or storage system is running out of disk space or warn you of impending storage hardware failure so that you can prevent unnecessary system and application downtime.

IBM Spectrum Control provides the following benefits and functions:

Simplifies the management of storage infrastructures
Manages, administers, and provisions SAN-attached storage
Monitors and tracks performance of SAN-attached resources
Monitors, manages, and controls (through zones) SAN fabric components
Manages the capacity utilization and availability of file systems

Get a quick overview of the storage monitoring features that are available in IBM Spectrum Control:

Table 1. Overview of features in IBM Spectrum Control
The table provides an overview of the features that are available in IBM Spectrum Control.
Features	Description
Understanding your environment	A single dashboard view of your storage environment to help you manage storage devices.
	Monitor IBM® and non-IBM block storage, file storage, object storage, hypervisors, fabrics, switches.
	Capacity monitoring of storage systems, pools, volumes, file systems, and file sets.
	Performance monitoring of storage systems, Fibre Channel networks, applications, and departments.
	Drill down performance workflows to troubleshoot bottlenecks.
	Define groups of resources that represent applications or departments.
	Explore storage and server virtualization relationships.
	Explore replication relationships.
Health and alerting	Show health status of hypervisors, networks, servers, and storage systems, and selected internal entities.
	Alert on status changes and thresholds of capacity, performance, and error metrics.
	Customizable, multi-conditional alerting and the ability to create alert policies for many devices.
Reporting	Inventory, capacity, and performance reports.
	Reports that you can create from the information in the user-interface tables. You can configure, schedule, and save this information to your file systems. Or you can specify to send it to another user or person by mail.
	Chargeback reports for showing the capacity and the cost of the storage that is used by applications, departments, hypervisors, and physical servers.
	Consumer reports for showing the capacity and the cost of the block storage that is used by an application, department, hypervisor, and physical server.
	Roll up reports in which capacity data is combined from multiple instances of IBM Spectrum Control for reporting purposes.
	Reports that use REST API and Cognos®.
Analytics	For storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize™, the transform storage feature moves volumes, and configures compression and the properties of the volumes.
	Storage reclamation that you can realize when the block storage systems in your data center are analyzed, and you determine and reclaim volumes that aren't used for storing data. You can replace the existing storage space instead of purchasing new storage media.
	Business impact analysis (applications, departments, and groups).
General	Active directory and LDAP integration for managing users.
	Customization options, including the ability to define the history retention of performance and capacity metadata, define how you are notified of alerts and notifications, and schedule when capacity and configuration metadata is automatically collected.
	Inclusion of the license for IBM Copy Services Manager to manage 2-site replication, 3-site replication, and advanced copy services. Learn more about how to download and install Copy Services Manager at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/csm.
	Snapshot-based protection that is provided by IBM Spectrum Protect™™ Snapshot for the applications and databases that IBM Spectrum Control uses.