Veritas Storage Foundation has been for many years a way to grapple with the increasing complexity of managing a variety of storage devices across multiple operating systems. Last years' acquisition by Symantec has not slowed Foundation down any, as Symantec just recently released a new version, Storage Foundation 5.0, and a global management application for Foundation. Storage Foundation Management Server brings multiple Foundation servers under a common, centralized administration console.
The first thing to clarify about Storage Foundation Management Server is that it doesn't manage storage directly, but is able to collect all the information seen by each Storage Foundation server via SQL queries. The system includes the Central Management Server (CMS) and Symantec Authentication Services, the latter a suite of applications to ensure controlled access to the CMS.
The remote administration capabilities of Storage Foundation Management Server were the first thing that impressed me during a demo prepared by Symantec. The demo was conducted by an admin based in Florida accessing a Foundation Management Server in India and controlling a geographically dispersed storage network with Foundation servers in India and the U.S.
The system can manage both Storage Foundation 5.0 and 4.1 servers, which facilitates a gradual update to the new version. The CMS conveys the data collected by remote agents into a dashboard that sums up possible errors or changing conditions using numbers and color codes.
The Dashboard has three different sections for storage, applications, and hosts, each presenting the number of objects present on the network and their status. In our demo, for example, 20 out of 572 volumes assigned had experienced errors.
It's worth remembering that in Symantec speech an application is the logical intersection of one or more objects such as databases, hosts, files systems, and disk groups, which creates an aggregated element not founnd anywhere else in the datacenter and must therefore be entered manually.
Naturally, the storage section totals the amount of space managed, listing also the overall amount of available and used space. From this overview, it's easy to dig for more details. In fact, selecting a segment, say applications in error, opens a list of applications affected and the errors that triggered that status.
Moving further down the path, it was easy to find that the reason for a certain error was a disconnected volume. On the same page the admin can access a variety of volume provisioning and maintenance tools to recover from a storage error, or shrink or expand a volume, without having to access the specific tools of each device.
Other standout features:
-- Intelligent provisioning, essentially the ability to select storage for a new group from aptly named volume organizations such as "mirrored-raid5" or "striped-mirrored." This should be useful both to experienced and rookie admins.
-- Global queries, which can find almost instantly answers that would otherwise require manually polling each server on the network. Take for example dynamic multi-pathing: A simple query will find all the single path exposures in your network, showing the volumes, applications, and storage devices affected. CMS can save those results to several formats, including Excel spreadsheets, a popular choice for many system administrators.
-- The Inventory view, a live picture of the system that can easily zoom to hard to find but important details such as the level of firmware and the port name of each HBA in your network.
-- The ability to monitor the progress of a replication task. This is unfortunately limited to Symantec solutions, but includes the recently released "bunker replication" that creates simultaneous mirrors at multiple locations.
Like previous versions, Storage Foundation Server 5.0 has a powerful rule creation system that can capture troublesome conditions such as a hardware error or a volume getting low on space and automatically start actions such as sending an e-mail message, adding to an SNMP queue, or running a script. Also worth noting is the effort by Symantec to give the CMS a friendly UI. For example, error codes are hyperlinked to Web documentation that explains in more detail possible causes and remedies.
Existing customers that have many Storage Foundation for Windows machines may want to wait; at the moment Storage Foundation Management Server doesn't handle Windows servers. Otherwise, my suggestion is to dive in. If the demo I saw is an indication of what the suite can do, you won’t be disappointed.
Veritas Storage Foundation Management Server
Symantec
Price: Free, but customers need a valid license for Veritas Storage Foundation; Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 license starts at $695 per processor per socket
Verdict: Storage Foundation Management Server brings together dispersed storage environments for customers that have already adopted the Veritas Storage Foundation paradigm. In addition, the ability to control the space managed by just about any OS and a large variety of storage systems makes the offer from Symantec particular intriguing.
Posted by Mario Apicella on August 30, 2006 12:23 PM
