Planning for IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud

IBM Storage Virtualize is a software-defined storage solution that has been proven for years in SAN Volume Controller and the IBM® Storwize® family. IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud extends that solution to a hybrid-cloud or cloud-based model, where servers, storage, and network infrastructure are delivered in a public cloud environment. It can be deployed on either IBM® Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructures.

With IBM Storage Insights, you can view the capacity, space usage, and performance of your IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage systems. Other monitoring features, such as alerting, health checking, advanced analytics, and reporting are also supported.

Benefits

IBM Storage Insights can help you predict and prevent storage problems before they impact your business. Here are some key benefits of using IBM Storage Insights to monitor your IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage systems:

View detailed information about capacity, storage usage, and performance.
Monitor health, status, and availability.
Use alerts and alert policies to be notified of conditions and potential problems.
Use advanced analytics to provision, optimize, and reclaim storage.
Create and share reports about inventory, capacity, performance, and storage consumption.

How to monitor

Before you can add an IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage system for monitoring, you must ensure that IBM Storage Insights can connect to it. To enable a connection, you can use the site-to-site VPN IPSec tunnel that exists between the on-premises environment and the IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud instances in AWS or IBM Cloud®.

For IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage systems that are implemented in AWS, you can also deploy the data collector on the Bastion host.

Tips:

For more information about the methods for configuring the connection between IBM Storage Insights and IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud, see the following topics:
- Monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud with on-premises data collection (Site to Site VPN IPsec)
- Monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud with off-premises data collection (in AWS and installed on the bastion host)
IBM Storage Insights uses the following ports for communicating with IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud:
- Outbound: 22 for SSH
- Outbound: 5989. Optionally, the SSH key can be uploaded once at setup time using the 5989 port.

Supported features

View a detailed list of the features in IBM Storage Insights that you can use to monitor IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage systems:

Table 1. Supported features for monitoring IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud
Resource Monitoring	Features	Supported
Understanding the environment	Monitor storage inventory and configuration. Includes information about type, model, serial number, and firmware.
	Understand storage relationships, from volume and share down to server and application.
	Explore virtualization relationships.
	Explore replication relationships.
	View dashboards to get insights into key aspects of your storage at a glance and one-click access to web-based element managers.
Monitoring capacity	Collect storage consumption and capacity metrics.
	View data reduction information.
	View copy data information.
	View internal storage tiers such as EasyTier.
	Monitor the storage consumed by applications.
Monitoring performance	Collect performance metrics about the workload on resources.	^*
	View calculated metrics to gain insights into performance conditions.
	Export performance data to a compressed file.
	Drill down performance workflows to troubleshoot bottlenecks.
	Compare the performance of resources.
Monitoring health	Understand the health of resources.
	Receive notifications when the status of a resource changes.
	View the status of elements that are not represented as resources.
Alerting	Alert on conditions within your storage environment.
	Define alerts to identify issues based on multiple conditions.
	Define alert policies to be notified of changes across related resources.
Reporting	View predefined reports.
	View chargeback and consumer reports.
	Create custom reports by using the REST API.
	Create rollup reports to view information across multiple servers.
Analytics	Analyze business impact (applications, departments, and groups).
	Optimize data placement with tiering.
	Optimize capacity with reclamation.
^* Performance metadata for managed disks in IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud is not available.

For your reference: Want to learn more about IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud? No problem. IBM provides the following documentation for your reference:

What's next

After you establish the method for connecting IBM Storage Insights to a IBM Storage Virtualize for Public Cloud storage system, you can add that storage system for monitoring, alerting, and reporting.

For instructions on how to add storage systems for monitoring, see Adding storage systems.