INFOBrief EMC VisualSRM Storage Resource Management Suite Key Points EMC VisualSRM is data center-class software specifically architected to provide centralized storage resource management for mid-tier storage environments. The VisualSRM portfolio of management software is designed to help increase capacity utilization, improve data availability, and automate file management processes for your multi-vendor, multiplatform storage infrastructures. It supports a wide range of storage platforms (DAS, NAS, and SAN), server platforms (Windows 2000/2003 and Windows NT, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, and NetWare), and data center applications (MS Exchange, Oracle databases, Sybase databases, and SQL Server databases.) VisualSRM gives administrators a powerful solution to efficiently manage their storage resources. In the current release of VisualSRM, the storage resource management suite has three distinct editions to address entry, midrange, and enterprise requirements. VisualSRM Standard Edition VisualSRM Standard Edition allows you to actively manage your storage with powerful visualization tools that allow for rapid identification of issues. It offers active, policy-based management of data storage resources for Intel-based platforms. It provides the ability to execute best practices for storage management with the use of active policies. VisualSRM Standard Edition includes both proactive and reactive management tools that help enable IT organizations achieve the availability levels required for mission-critical environments. Furthermore, it contains comprehensive storage reports and the ability to charge back. VisualSRM Standard Edition supports Microsoft Windows, MSCS clusters, Novell NetWare, and Linux platforms. It gives IT Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 1 November 2004
administrators the ability to manage their SAN, NAS, and DAS environments. VisualSRM Exchange Edition The VisualSRM Exchange Edition provides centralized monitoring, reporting, and browsing with drilldown capabilities for all Exchange applications managed. This provides the system administrator with visibility external to Exchange by showing how much storage space the Exchange server has consumed and trending growth. In addition, VisualSRM Exchange shows the internal usage and growth trends at the private and public store level and allows the administrator to view reports or drill down in the user interface to the mailbox level. The VisualSRM Exchange Edition help make it easy to plan for growth of the Exchange server, manage growth of individual mailboxes with thresholds, and allows the administrator to quickly identify stale or unused mailboxes by drilling down to the mailbox level in the user interface. VisualSRM Database Server Edition The VisualSRM Database Server Edition supports Oracle9i, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase database applications. These database application modules provide centralized monitoring, browsing, and reporting for multiple databases. This enables system administrators to track database file and log sizes, utilization levels (allocated versus consumed) and auto-extend status. Tracking can be performed at the system and individual user-storage-consumption levels. Trending data can be captured to determine weekly growth rates by database instance. SRM is the First Step in an Information Lifecycle Management Strategy Most enterprises recognize that information be it email, intellectual property, or any other kind of data is a significant corporate asset. It is also clear that not all information stored by an enterprise is of equal value. Some types of information have consistently high value. Some information has little or no value. Moreover, a significant amount of information changes in value over the course of time. To align IT resources appropriately, administrators must know what information they have and must understand its value (and perhaps changing value) to the business. Only then can they begin to apply policies to govern the service levels performance, disaster recovery, etc. associated with the information. VisualSRM software is a great tool to begin this process. Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 2 November 2004
The goal of VisualSRM is to manage resources in the most efficient way possible so that an enterprise can make the best use of storage assets hardware, software, and personnel. A See-Know-Do approach is what is needed. VisualSRM allows administrators to see all the elements of the storage infrastructure, including the physical elements like servers, SAN devices and storage arrays, and the logical elements like file systems and database elements, etc. VisualSRM knows about the connections between the physical and logical elements, so administrators can understand the interrelationships of the elements. VisualSRM does what is necessary, monitoring and reacting to changes in the infrastructure, be they physical changes (port failures) or logical changes (a full file system). This is where automation begins, and where a management system s actions are driven by policies based on service level commitments or business rules. These See-Know-Do capabilities of VisualSRM are an invaluable set of tools in a scalable enterprise. They form the logical basis for the building blocks that will enable effective information management. Assess and classify what you have; set up and manage policies and service levels SRM is on the Rise Enterprises today are generating enormous amounts of information, resulting in intense pressure on IT operations to manage it all with limited resources amidst dwindling budgets. This is exacerbated for midsize businesses where IT teams are often spread thin and each individual often takes on many roles. Where large enterprises may have dedicated Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 3 November 2004
storage talent, mid-size businesses generally have systems or database administrators who also take care of storage management tasks. Storage management requirements such as monitoring, reporting on, and allocating resources are similar to those of larger enterprises, but midsize businesses require solutions tailored for their staffing reality. These enterprises are demanding storage management tools that are easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to automate and easy on the IT budget that will allow them to manage, store, provide access to and protect the increasing amounts of information using less resources. VisualSRM is designed to help improve capacity utilization and data availability while automating storage resource management. VisualSRM has an easy to use and customizable Web-based user interface with an intuitive dashboard and pre-loaded templates and wizards for policy creation, drill-down reporting capabilities, and logical views of storage systems, applications, and product configurations. VisualSRM can be installed quickly, providing value in a flash. It installs by means of a series of simple intuitive implementation and setup wizards. In todayʹs data-rich economy, an enterprise s success depends on the uninterrupted and ever-increasing flow of information. VisualSRM helps you maintain high levels of information availability and optimize application requirements while improving IT staff productivity through the automation of management and maintenance tasks. VisualSRM gives administrators a single solution to efficiently manage the growing number and size of files, helping to eliminate recurring expenses. Administrators might, for example, set automated policy actions to move, copy, delete, or archive all mpeg files from highperformance storage to less-expensive near line storage, effectively eliminating the need for daily or full backup of such non-essential files. VisualSRM allows administrators to Visually display how resources are being used, and manage those resources efficiently Track system and individual storage consumption to help ensure capacity is available when and where needed, Help reduce or potentially eliminate server outages and application downtime due to out-of-control disk-space consumption Reclaim wasted capacity, identify aged and out-of-compliance files to potentially save money and help lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) Deploy policy-based storage management automation to help ensure that service levels are met and that no data is at risk of being lost Help improve storage utilization while reducing TCO Focus on the core business rather than storage administrative tasks Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 4 November 2004
Discover, Assess, Reclaim, and Manage IT infrastructure management is becoming increasingly complex. Twenty-four-by-seven information access, multi-terabyte databases, and the availability of skilled staff to manage and support these infrastructures are some of the challenges you face within your enterprise. VisualSRM products help increase utilization, improve availability, and automate file management processes for your multi-vendor, mid-tier storage environment. VisualSRM provides views into system resources and file-level detail reporting that enables automated resource management and capacity planning. The primary features and benefits of VisualSRM include: Intuitive User Interface - VisualSRM provides an easy to use, customizable Web-based graphical user interface. Its calendar function displays scheduled policies, and its event log records all activities across Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 5 November 2004
managed resources. VisualSRM s user interface utilizes wizards for policy creation, provides drill-down reporting capabilities, and supplies intuitive views of enterprise, storage, systems, applications, and product configurations. Openness - VisualSRM is storage-agnostic, supporting heterogeneous platforms providing file-level reporting from a host perspective on both UNIX and Windows platforms for SAN, NAS, and DAS. Platforms supported include Windows 2000/2003, Windows NT, Novell, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and NetWare. Broad Application Support - VisualSRM enables application-centric storage management by interfacing directly with data center applications like Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, Sybase, and Oracle databases. VisualSRM integrates with other leading storage management applications from backup and framework vendors such as IBM, HP, CA, and BMC. File-Level Policies - VisualSRM enables IT administrators to set and enforce storage thresholds at granular levels like volume, partition, share, directory, and sub-directory. When a threshold is exceeded, VisualSRM gives IT managers the flexibility to take a range of actions. If a user filesystem exceeds a threshold, VisualSRM can take an action to move, delete, compress, or archive files to free up space. To match data with the most appropriate and cost-effective storage media, VisualSRM helps companies categorize data and define category-based storage management policies that speed ROI. Policy-Based Management - VisualSRM helps IT administrators meet their policy goals by automating processes across storage, system, and application resources. This saves time while providing predictable and repeatable results. VisualSRM provides the ability to sequentially execute policies through Policy Task Lists (PTLs), allowing policies to work together toward completing a task. Reporting - VisualSRM creates built-in reports to be run interactively or as scheduled report jobs, showing detail and summary-level information, trending analysis for capacity planning, and chargeback capabilities. Custom reports are easy to add and can be generated in all common formats PDF, XML, HTML, XLS, and RTF. Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 6 November 2004
Potential Benefits Save time and people costs by automatically maintaining an optimized storage environment Minimize business costs of downtime and poor performance through proactive management Simplify the management of any size environment and reduce capital costs by maximizing storage utilization Improve administrator productivity through better understanding of storage Lower the cost of managing multi-vendor, multiplatform storage networks Provide insight into inefficient use of storage resources for corrective action Maintain historical and trending information for better capacity planning You Manage Your Infrastructure; It Doesn t Manage You VisualSRM consolidates and enables you to view your storage assets with a single software tool, letting you fully understand how your storage is being used, and just as importantly, identify storage that is underutilized. By seeing the whole picture, you can better manage and utilize your existing storage assets and plan for future growth. VisualSRM helps enterprises move from passive storage management processes to automated storage management, enabling users to understand the usage patterns, and configure and proactively control the use of their storage resources according to business requirements. Administrators can set thresholds on criteria and events such as capacity levels, age of files, or time since a file has been accessed and set policies that define actions to be taken when an event occurs. VisualSRM will help you reclaim storage, increase storage utilization, and lower the storage growth rate to help you defer future storage purchases, and can yield dramatic savings in the overall cost of storage. By better understanding your logical and physical environment, you can make better use of your existing storage assets. VisualSRM helps you improve application performance, plan for data migration, and meet the data retention requirements of government regulations. Finally, Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 7 November 2004
VisualSRM allows you to automate common day-to-day activities, which can help increase storage administrator productivity: Automated file-level storage resource management accurately manages the lifecycle of your data by creating automated policy actions based on thresholds, events, or advanced scheduling. Extensive reporting and trend analysis offers real-time and historical analysis of storage usage at the file-level detail. Allows the system administrator to predict usage and monitor performance. Capacity, utilization, and availability VisualSRM provides detailed filelevel information and drill-down capabilities for applications such as Exchange, Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase. Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 8 November 2004
Platform Support VisualSRM currently supports the following server and application platforms. Check with your Dell sales representative for the most current list of supported platforms. Windows NT/2000/2003 MSCS Clusters Sun Solaris Red Hat Linux HP-UX IBM AIX NetWare Clients Application Support Oracle9i-Release 2 (9.2.0.1.0) Microsoft Exchange 5.5, 2000/2003 Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3a Sybase 12.0, 12.5 Take the Next Step Contact your Dell sales representative or visit our website at http://www.dell.com to obtain more information about EMC storage software offerings. Service and Support Please note: Dell services vary by region. The services listed below are available in the United States; please contact your local representative for more information, or visit http://www.dell.com. Professional Services: Storage Solutions: Dellʹs integrated storage services portfolio offers a full range of lifecycle storage services from initial assessment to planning and design through our tools-based methodologies and best practices. Dell can assist with effective planning, rapid deployment and efficient operations of storage solutions. Support Services: Customers will be entitled to technical support via the telephone if they have Advanced Software Support Resolution Packs. Customers that do not have resolutions packs can purchase them. Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 9 November 2004
For details on all programs contact Dell. Service specifications are valid in the US only and subject to change without notification. Dell cannot be responsible for errors in typography or photography. Dell, the Dell logo, PowerVault, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Copyright 2004 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information contact Dell. Dell Enterprise Product Group Page 10 November 2004