Let's face it, if you don't have experience as a storage administrator or if you don't work for a storage company then configuring and managing storage can be overwhelming. I know, I've been there. I spent the first half of my career as a Novell and Windows administrator then a consultant for many of Microsoft's technologies. I was recruited by a storage company (pre-EMC) to be a Microsoft specialist and during my interview I was asked if I could explain the difference between a NAS and a SAN. I didn't even try and realized I had a lot to learn.
Of course I've learned a lot since then and I find storage management to be easy especially when you look at the interfaces and the wizards that EMC has built. Most storage operations can be completed in just a few clicks of the mouse and the wizards guide you through everything. But still, when your focus is managing Windows Servers or Microsoft Sharepoint for instance, storage is typically handled by someone else.
Concepts like LUNs, volumes, initiators, clustering and offsets can be confusing!
EMC recognizes this and has been working to help make storage simple for the Windows administrator. There are several new initiatives and applications underway. One that we won't discuss on the blog just yet has been in development for a while now and has been showcased at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) and will be seen again at EMC World and Microsoft TechEd. This new application is a home grown management app that will allow Windows administrators to perform complex storage tasks by following easy to use wizards all from an interface that is very familiar to them. The fundamental difference is that it isn't about creating and managing storage, it is application and server focused and automates many the underlying storage operations. I'm telling you, it is pretty cool.
The other tool we have been working on actually leverages Microsoft technology. We have been working on a set of Management Packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) that provide an overall visualization of your storage infrastructure as well as detailed information on storage objects like storage processors and disk drives as well as health reporting. We've had management packs for years but one of the things that's unique about this implementation of the SCOM Management Packs is that we leverage SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification, a standards from SNIA for developing and managing storage systems). This will give us a foundation so that any EMCs array supporting SMI-S will easily plug into this existing framework so that it can be managed in System Center. Here is a screen shot from System Center of our Management Packs:
Also, by pulling all of this EMC storage detail into System Center, we can extend out to other System Center products to easily integrate with them as well including Virtual Machine Manager, Configuration Manager and Orchestrator. SMI-S is what Microsoft is using in VMM 2012 to communicate with external arrays so naturally the work we are doing today will enable us to do more functionality in the future.
As of a matter of fact, at MMS 2011 we had demos of all of our Management Packs working with System Center 2012…which had just been announced that morning at the show!! Want a sneak peak? Here are a few screen shots of our Management Packs for SCOM 2012 (the EMC graphics were lost during the import to the new SCOM beta code).
Want to check these out yourself and be in our Beta program? Send me an email and I'll help get you in touch with the team behind these tools! Also feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts if there is something we could be doing better!
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