Architecture

The IBM Spectrum Control consists of several components that form the infrastructure of its storage-management functions.

Data server: This component is the control point for product scheduling functions, configuration, and event information. It also includes functions that schedule data collection and discovery for the Device server.
Device server: This component discovers, gathers information from, analyzes performance of, and controls storage subsystems and SAN fabrics. It coordinates communication with and data collection from agents that scan SAN fabrics and storage devices.
Web server: IBM Spectrum Control uses WebSphere Application Server Liberty as the web application server to host its GUI, and storage management API for cloud.
Alert server: This component manages the complex event processing that is related to alerting on the condition of resources and their attributes. The ability to detect and be notified about configuration, capacity, and performance changes within a storage environment is important to helping you maintain and administer storage resources.
Export server: This component enables the export of data from the tables in the GUI to HTML format and the creation of custom reports that show information about capacity, configuration, and health status of the resources in your storage environment. It runs in the Node.js environment and you can produce custom reports for storage systems, back-end storage systems, and their internal resources such as disks, pools, and volumes.
IBM® Cognos® Analytics (optional): If you plan to use the optional Cognos Analytics reports, you must install IBM Cognos Analytics. You can use Cognos Analytics to create reports and view predefined reports to analyze multiple storage systems, switches, servers, and hypervisors. You can install Cognos Analytics on the same computer with IBM Spectrum Control or you can install Cognos Analytics on a separate computer.
Database: A single database instance serves as the repository for all IBM Spectrum Control components.
Agents: Storage Resource agent, CIM agents, and SNMP agents gather host, application, storage system, and SAN fabric information and send that information to the Data server or Device server.
GUI: Use the IBM Spectrum Control GUI to manage the storage infrastructure in an enterprise environment.
CLI: Use the command-line interface (CLI) to issue commands for key IBM Spectrum Control functions.