Change History for IBM Spectrum Control
View a history of the changes in previous versions of IBM Spectrum Control.
Changes in 5.3.6
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.6:
- Monitoring performance for Dell EMC Unity and NetApp storage systems running ONTAP 9
- Support for monitoring and alerting on performance is now added for the following non-IBM® storage systems:
- Dell EMC Unity
- NetApp storage systems that are running ONTAP 9
- Monitoring Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series and G Series
- Add Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) F Series and G Series to the list of non-IBM storage systems that you can monitor and report on directly in IBM Spectrum Control.
- More support for IBM FlashSystem® devices
- You can now view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the FlashSystem 5000, FlashSystem 5100, FlashSystem 7200, and FlashSystem 9200 storage systems.
- Gaining insights into capacity usage and capacity growth
- When you log in to IBM Spectrum
Control, you want to
know how much capacity you have, how much capacity you've used, and how much usable capacity is
still available. To make this information more consumable, the overview charts have got a makeover.
But, that's not all. Now, with a click, you can access key capacity metrics for each pool and volume
in your storage systems. And, to help you plan capacity, two new metrics were added:
- Recent Fill Rate (%)
- Recent Growth (GiB)
- Aligning capacity terms
- To enhance your experience of our products and to provide a unified and simplified view of capacity concepts, IBM Storage is aligning the capacity terms across all IBM Storage products. To ensure that we use the same capacity term for the same capacity concept across our products, IBM Spectrum Control has changed 47 of the capacity terms that it uses, removed 4 terms that are no longer needed, and added 1 new term.
- Viewing capacity savings for devices that support hardware compression
- You can now view the amount and percentage of capacity that is saved for devices that use inline data compression technology, such as IBM FlashSystem 9100 and IBM Storwize® V7000 Gen3.
- Monitoring the cache fullness of pools on IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- See how full your cache is by adding new cache fullness metrics to the performance charts when you view the performance of pools in your storage systems. Add and track cache fullness metrics to identify the pools that are experiencing heavy cache usage. You can also use the metrics to help investigate problems with volumes in a pool and to determine whether to move a volume to a different I/O group where the pool's cache partition does not have a cache fullness problem.
- Monitoring the aggregated cache fullness of nodes at storage system level on IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- See how full your nodes cache is at storage system level by adding new cache fullness metrics to the performance charts when you view the performance of storage systems. Add and track cache fullness metrics to identify the nodes that are experiencing heavy cache usage. You can also use the metrics to help investigate problems for volumes in a pool and to determine whether to move a volume to a different I/O group where the pool's cache partition does not have a cache fullness problem.
- Monitoring unmap operations at host connection level on IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- Track the workload of unmap operations that each host contributes to the system. To do this, you can measure the performance of unmap volume operations at host connection level. Metrics, such as the average number of MiBs that are unmapped from volumes, I/O rates, data rates, and response times for unmap operations, are collected and shown.
- Monitoring Storage Class Memory (SCM) on IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- You can now monitor the volume capacity that Easy Tier® places on SCM drives on IBM Spectrum Virtualize systems, such as IBM FlashSystem 9100, IBM FlashSystem 7200, and the IBM Storwize family.
- Creating inventory reports about IP ports
- You can now create and schedule predefined reports about the IP ports on the nodes in IBM Spectrum Virtualize systems, such as SAN Volume Controller, IBM FlashSystem 9100, FlashSystem V9000, FlashSystem V840, and the IBM Storwize family.
- Adding IP ports to general groups
- You can now add IP ports to general groups so that you can receive alert notifications about changes in the configuration or attributes of the IP ports in a general group.
- Monitoring disk utilization for RAID arrays on DS8000® storage systems
- For RAID arrays on DS8000 version 8.5.0 and later, the disk utilization values were updated in performance charts and reports. You can now more accurately check how busy the disks in the array are over a period and identify arrays that are underutilized and overutilized.
- Support for IBM Cognos® Analytics
- IBM Spectrum Control now supports IBM Cognos Analytics Version 11.1.4. Note that IBM Cognos Analytics does not run on Windows Server 2019 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 8.
Changes in 5.3.5
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.5:
- Important capacity updates
- Capacity values were updated to better reflect capacity usage in devices that support hardware compression. Capacity, such as pool capacity and allocated space, is now measured based on the physical capacity of the device, rather than the effective capacity.
- Product fixes and security updates
- In every release of IBM Spectrum Control, IBM fixes issues that are reported by our internal teams and by our customers. Along with fixes, improving the operation and security of the product is also a priority. See what's been updated and fixed in this release:
Changes in 5.3.4
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.4:
- Monitoring unmap operations on IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- You can now measure the performance of unmap volume commands and define alerts so that you are
notified when unmap operations values fall outside thresholds you specify. Metrics, such as the
average number of MiBs that are unmapped from volumes, I/O rates, data rates, and response times for
unmap operations, are collected and shown:
- At the pool level
- At the node level
- At the I/O group level
- Enhanced OS support
- You can now install IBM Spectrum Control and Storage Resource agents on servers that run Windows Server 2019 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
- Product fixes and security updates
- In every release of IBM Spectrum Control, IBM fixes issues that are reported by our internal teams and by our customers. Along with fixes, improving the operation and security of the product is also a priority. See what's been updated and fixed in this release:
Changes in 5.3.3
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.3:
- IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control
- IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control is an IBM Cloud service that can help you predict and prevent storage problems before they impact your business. It is complementary to IBM Spectrum Control and is available at no additional cost if you have an active license with a current subscription and support agreement for IBM Virtual Storage Center, IBM Spectrum Storage Suite, or any edition of IBM Spectrum Control.
- Monitoring IBM Storwize V5000E storage systems
- You can now monitor Storwize V5000E storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. Other features, such as alerting, health monitoring, advanced analytics, and reporting are also supported.
- Viewing application performance
- You can now view the total workload of an application that is consuming storage resources. Previously, to investigate the workload of an application, you had to review the workloads of the individual volumes. Now you can select an application from the Applications page and click View Performance to see the Total I/O Rate and the Total Data Rate for the application. On the applications details page, you can view the Aggregated Workload charts.
- Faster ways to view and acknowledge your alerts
- Now it's easier and faster to view and acknowledge your alerts. On the Alerts dashboard, just double-click an alert to see details of the alert on the same screen, including a performance chart for performance alerts. You can view summary details of several alerts at the same time, and acknowledge them all with a single click.
- Automate changing the password for Spectrum Control on Windows
- You can now run the changepassword.bat script from Windows Command Line Interface, or from an automated script, to change the passwords for the Spectrum Control user ID or for the database user ID.
- Improved support for special characters in Spectrum Control and DB2 passwords
- IBM Spectrum Control has improved the support for special characters in passwords, giving you the flexibility that you need based on your security requirements.
- IBM Spectrum Control ports have TLS 1.1 and 1.0 disabled by default to increase security
- Prior to version 5.3.3, IBM Spectrum Control ports had TLS 1.1 and 1.0 enabled by default. To increase security IBM Spectrum Control ports have TLS 1.1 and 1.0 disabled by default. Therefore, IBM Spectrum Control won't be able to communicate with devices that do not support TLS 1.2. If you want to upgrade your devices to a version that supports TLS 1.2, contact your vendor.
Changes in 5.3.2
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.2:
- Configuring alerts using alert policies
- Configuring alerts is now easier! You can now use alert policies to configure alerts for groups of resources rather than just for individual resources.
- Reporting
- Create and schedule predefined reports about the capacity that is assigned to hypervisors.
- Create an inventory report about your servers' ports showing information about the ports that your servers are connected to.
- Easily generate predefined capacity reports about the resources that you are interested in. It just takes a click to select managed disks by storage systems, pools by storage systems, servers by applications, volumes by servers.
- Send custom and predefined reports as CSV and HTML attachments. Recipients can then download and open the report in a tool of their choice.
- Can't wait for the next run of a monthly report? Just click and run the report now to share the information with your colleagues!
- Monitoring compression savings for RAID arrays in IBM FlashSystem 900, model AE3 storage system
- For FlashSystem 900, model AE3 with firmware version 1.6, you can now view the amount of capacity that is saved when the flash modules in the RAID array use inline data compression.
- Identifying mirrored volume relationships on storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- To help you identify the primary and secondary copies in mirrored volume relationships, the following properties for volumes were renamed:
- Target is now named Mirror Role and shows the value "Primary" or "Secondary".
- Mirror is now named Copy ID.
Tip: The name changes for these columns are also reflected in the volume information that is retrieved by using the REST API for IBM Spectrum Control. Ensure that you update any 3rd-party tools or reports that you use to show information from the REST API.
Changes in 5.3.1
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.1:
- Reporting enhancements:
- From a single page, create predefined capacity reports that you can schedule, send by email and save to your file system.
- Create predefined inventory reports for your storage systems and for the storage resources that they use, such as nodes.
- Add filters to custom reports. For example, you want to create a report that shows whether your file systems have enough capacity.
- You can now monitor Storwize V7000 Gen3 storage systems. You can view information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of the storage systems. You can also view the savings that are achieved when data is reduced, compressed, and deduplicated.
Changes in 5.3.0
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.3.0:
- Create custom reports. From any table view, create reports to share information with your colleagues and managers about the capacity, configuration, and health status and the performance of the resources that you monitor in your storage environment.
- Monitor IBM FlashSystem 9100 storage systems.
- Prevent your FlashSystem 900 from running out of capacity by monitoring the physical capacity and receiving alerts when the physical capacity is low. View information about pool capacity and the used and available capacity in the RAID array.
- Add multiple storage systems for monitoring at the same time.
Changes in 5.2.17
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.17:
- View detailed information about the enclosures for block storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize, such as FlashSystem V9000, FlashSystem V840, FlashSystem 900, SAN Volume Controller, and the IBM Storwize family.
- Use new overview charts for storage systems to answer key physical capacity, volume capacity,
and capacity savings questions:
- How much space is available.
- How much of your thin-provisioned volume space is used.
- How much space you are saving by using compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning.
- For storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize version 8.1.1 or later, use the Pool Attributes column to distinguish data reduction pools from standard pools and identify if the data in the pool is encrypted. For storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize version 8.1.3 or later, you can also view the capacity savings that are made when you use data reduction pools.
- For storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize version 8.1.3 or later, you can see the amount and percentage of capacity that is saved when data is deduplicated. The capacity savings for deduplication are shown at the storage systems, pools, and volumes levels.
- For storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize, you can track the historical capacity and the capacity savings that were achieved when volumes are compressed. This allows you to monitor the efficiency of compression over time.
- Use the Compressed and Deduplicated filters to show only volumes with the selected filter value.
Changes in 5.2.16
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.16:
- Monitor the availability of clusters by checking which nodes have spare nodes. You can also check the status of the spare nodes, such as which nodes are online and which nodes are on standby.
- Monitor the workload of compressed volumes on storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize™. You can view I/O rate, data rate, and response time metrics for compressed volumes and uncompressed volumes. See Compression metrics for volumes.
- In previous releases, IBM Cognos Business Intelligence reports was installed with and could be
accessed directly from IBM Spectrum
Control. In this
release, IBM Cognos Analytics is installed as a separate product. See
Migrating reports to IBM Cognos Analytics during upgrade. - The integration with external LDAP repositories in IBM Spectrum Control is improved.
Changes in 5.2.15
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.15:
- Creating agentless servers used to be a manual process, and automating it was a frequently requested enhancement. IBM Spectrum Control now automatically generates agentless servers for the physical servers and virtual machines in your SAN environment, so that you can easily see how they are consuming storage.
- Change the default names of the tiers that are shown in the GUI.
- Add or change properties, such as the location or custom tags, for multiple servers, storage systems, hypervisors, switches, or fabrics. You can use the properties to filter or sort the resources in the GUI or in an external application if the data is shared or exported.
- Define more than 30 new alerts for volumes in block storage systems, including alerts for capacity values such as Compression Savings, Data Deduplication Savings, Data Reduction Savings, and Unallocated Volume Space. Use these alerts to detect and monitor potential configuration and capacity issues in your environment.
- Find volumes with the same attributes. Use the new filters, such as Easy Tier and Mirror, to show only volumes with the selected filtered value. You can also sort the volumes by allocated and unallocated space, and much more.
- Add and monitor IBM Spectrum Virtualize software-only clusters.
- IBM DB2® Version 11.1 is now included with IBM Spectrum Control.
- Use the Representational State Transfer (REST) API to automatically export the data that you
need to generate custom reports or share with external applications. The following information is
now available:
- How much capacity is used by applications, departments, hypervisors, and physical servers.
- How much block capacity is used by a specific application, department, hypervisor, or physical server.
Changes in 5.2.14
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.14:
- Enhancements for IBM Cloud Object
Storage:
- Add COS Vaults to applications and general groups so you can track how much space is being consumed by logically related vaults and how that consumption trends over time.
- Use the enhanced Vaults by Accessers chart, and the new Vaults by Drives and Slicestors by Drives charts, to monitor the availability of all your COS Vaults and COS Slicestor® nodes.
- View the number of failed drives in the COS Slicestor nodes and the tolerance of the nodes to more drive failures.
- View the tolerance of COS Vaults to drive failures across all the COS Slicestor nodes in the storage pool.
- View the COS Vaults, access pools, and storage pools that are used by IBM Spectrum Scale storage systems.
- The user experience is enhanced within the GUI for integration with an external LDAP repository. IBM Spectrum Control is now available to a larger set of users and groups and you are able to log in to IBM Spectrum Control with one set of credentials.
- IBM Spectrum Control ensures, when it sends alert notifications and reports by email to your email server, that it complies with the security standards that you configure on your email server.
- You can now choose the unit of measurement for a capacity metric when you create or edit chargeback and consumer reports. So, you can generate reports that show storage consumption in the unit of measurement of your choice whether it is PB or PiB, TB or TiB, or GB or GiB.
- View the following port delay metrics for storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize: Port Delay Time, Port Delay I/O Percentage
- DS8000 storage systems, you can now see the hosts and host clusters that host connections belong to.
- View a list of all the primary volumes that are not protected by a copy data relationship.
- View which Managed Disks are active Quorum disks.
- View the site name of each node in a stretched cluster.
- For Storwize storage systems, version 7.8 or later, you can now view information about flash drives by tier in storage pools and volumes. For storage pools, you can view the capacity and available capacity for solid-state drives (Tier 0) and for read-intensive flash storage (Tier 1). For volumes, you can view the capacity for solid-state drives (Tier 0) and for read-intensive flash storage (Tier 1).
- Upload logs automatically to IBM Software Support to help resolve problems quickly.
Changes in 5.2.13
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.13:
- View more information about the capacity, space usage, and performance of Dell EMC. Support for versions of Dell EMC SMI-S Provider or Dell EMC Solutions Enabler that are compliant with SMI-S 1.6 provides a more representative view of Dell EMC VMAX, Dell EMC VNX, and Dell EMC VNXe storage systems.
- Gain insights into the external storage that is used by IBM Spectrum
Scale:
- View capacity values for the external storage that clusters and file systems use. This view provides insight into the total amount of data that is migrated from all file systems in a storage system, or the amount of data that is migrated from specific file systems.
- Check whether you have enough internal space to recall data that was migrated to external storage.
- For storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize, you can now see the cluster that host connections belong to.
- Enhancements for IBM Cloud Object
Storage:
- View information about the hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and flash modules in COS Slicestor nodes.
- In the Vaults by Accessers chart, view the vaults that cannot be accessed and the vaults that are at risk of access failure.
- On the new VDisk Mirrors and HyperSwap® pages in the Copy Data panel, you can analyze storage device relationships across your block storage environment in IBM Spectrum Control to identify how redundancy is affecting available capacity.
- You exclude the cost of storage in chargeback and consumer reports when you want to highlight storage consumption and not storage cost.
Changes in 5.2.12
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.12:
- Monitor the capacity, space usage, and performance of FlashSystem A9000 and FlashSystem A9000R storage systems.
- Create consumer reports that show the capacity and the cost of the block storage that an application, department, hypervisor, or physical server uses.
- Report on allocated versus assigned capacity in chargeback and consumer reports.
- Analyze replication and FlashCopy relationships across your block storage environment
- View the amount of external storage from cloud services and other storage providers that is being used by the file systems in a IBM Spectrum Scale cluster. For external storage that is provided by IBM Cloud Object Storage, you can also view capacity information, including the percentage of space that is being used.
- Monitor sites, mirrors, and vault quotas for IBM Cloud Object
Storage. For example, you can:
- Monitor the capacity and space usage of sites. See which COS Slicestor and COS Accesser® nodes are located at each site and which sites cannot tolerate COS Accesser node failures.
- View the space quotas that are configured for vaults and see whether any vaults are violating the soft or hard quota limits.
- View information about mirrors, such as the pair of vaults in each of the mirrors, and the number of COS Accesser nodes that are configured to access the mirrors. You can also see the storage pools and sites for the vaults in the mirror.
- Define alerts that notify you of status changes on the IBM Spectrum Scale nodes that are configured as cloud gateways.
- Customize the analysis period for analyzing tiering and balancing pools to the days of the week and hours of the day of your choice.
- Access information about your resources by using the Representational State Transfer (REST) API for IBM Spectrum Control. You can use this information to generate custom configuration and performance reports.
Changes in 5.2.11
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.11:
- Changes to alerts:
- Create alerts for a set of storage resources that are assigned to an application.
- Define alerts for a set of resources in custom groups that you create.
- Combine multiple alert conditions from multiple resources in a single, custom alert.
- Create, schedule, and send chargeback reports by email to make the owners and managers aware of the cost of the capacity and the amount of capacity that is used by their applications, departments, hypervisors, and servers.
- View key performance metrics for IBM® FlashSystem™ 840 and IBM FlashSystem 900 storage systems:
- Response times
- I/O rates and data rates
- The condition of the storage system
- Review new capacity charts to detect capacity shortages and investigate trends in storage growth for your tiers.
- Analyze replication relationships across your block storage environment.
- Monitor the status, capacity, and space usage of IBM Cloud Object Storage.
- Identify which file systems in a Spectrum Scale cluster use external storage that is provided by cloud services or other storage providers.
- Enable automated probe scheduling to simplify the process of scheduling probes and help avoid excessive load on the product server.
- Determine whether the total capacity of the storage systems that IBM Spectrum Control manages exceeds your product license entitlement.
- When you complete a fresh installation of the product, the number of random listening ports is reduced. Information about the ports is documented and you can change the Device server ports after you complete the installation or perform an upgrade.
- Manually uninstall IBM Tivoli® Storage Productivity Center for Replication from IBM Spectrum Control servers on your computer.
- IBM DB2® Version 10.5 Fix Pack 7 is now included with IBM Spectrum Control.
Changes in 5.2.10
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.10:
- Identify key performance metrics that are outside of a standard range on IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller and IBM Storwize® storage systems.
- Export performance data for a resource to a compressed file.
- Review new capacity charts to detect capacity shortages and investigate trends in storage growth for your block, file, and object storage resources.
- Review the capacity and space usage that the tiered storage in your environment consumes. You can see when your tiered storage will run out of space and the weekly growth rate in storage usage for each tier.
- View the values for the capacity of virtualized storage and non-virtualized storage to understand how capacity is used when storage virtualization is implemented in your storage environment.
- Use rollup reporting to combine capacity and status information from multiple instances of IBM Spectrum Control™. You can use this information to gain a network-wide perspective of storage usage in your environment when you have multiple IBM Spectrum Control servers deployed.
- Group 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.
- IBM Spectrum Control V5.2.10 now supports only Storage Management Initiative (SMI) data sources, also called CIM agents, for managing switches from Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
- View the resource types that were explicitly added to an application or subcomponent.
Changes in 5.2.9
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.9:
- Reclaim unused storage capacity and more effectively allocate volume space on your block storage systems.
- View the amount of storage that can be reclaimed in each of the storage systems that are monitored.
- Use the volume reclamation recommendations to reclaim unused storage space and use your storage more efficiently. By reclaiming the volumes, you can reduce costs by recycling existing storage space instead of purchasing new storage media.
- IBM Spectrum Control™ now displays the switch blade number, port number, and blade names just as they were defined in other tools, such as Brocade Network Advisor.
- IBM DB2® Version 10.5 Fix Pack 6 is now included with IBM Spectrum Control.
Changes in 5.2.8
The following features and enhancements were available in IBM Spectrum
Control 5.2.8:
- The name of the product was changed from IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center to IBM Spectrum Control.
- Comprehensive improvements to alerting capabilities:
- You can now define alerts for all the key attributes of a resource, including attributes for status, configuration, capacity, and performance.
- To avoid receiving too many emails and disruptive notifications for some alerts, you can now choose a new suppression option where only one notification is sent.
- If you want to define more than one alert for the same attribute but with different criteria and settings, you can duplicate that alert.
- View the performance of clusters, nodes, and file systems in IBM Spectrum Scale.
- Monitor object storage systems on IBM Spectrum Scale.
- Monitor the capacity and space usage of IBM FlashSystem 840 and IBM FlashSystem 900 storage systems.
- View charts that show the current and historical capacity of your block storage pools.
- IBM Spectrum Control is now a native, 64-bit application for all server operating systems.
- Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Version 3 is now the preferred protocol for the management of switches and fabrics from Cisco Systems, Inc., and is an optional protocol for devices from Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. and other vendors.
- View information about the performance of inter-switch connections.
- View information about Brocade switches that are in Access Gateway mode. You can also view information about the routes from ports that are connected to a hypervisor, server, or storage system to ports that are connected to fabrics.
- View information about Brocade F_port trunks and about NPV links.
- You can now more easily identify the internal resources that are encountering problems in your environment.
- Compare how much capacity is managed by IBM Spectrum Control with the total amount of capacity that you are entitled to manage.
- View information about the capacity for each of the class drives (SSD, Nearline HDD, and Enterprise HDD), that Easy Tier can use to tier or distribute volume extents.
- To consolidate the functions of IBM Spectrum Control into a single GUI, the stand-alone GUI was removed.