Getting to know EMC Storage Analytics 3.0

<p>Welcome to the series of introduction to ESA 3.0 (EMC Storage Analytics). First things first, what is ESA?  Generally speaking, it’s a monitoring tool for you to keep an eye on the EMC storage resources in your data center, especially … <a href="http://thecoreblog.emc.com/2015/01/30/getting-know-emc-storage-analytics-3-0/">Continue reading <span>→</span></a><br /></p><h3>Author information</h3> <div> <div><img src="https://www.delltechnologies.com/uploads/2015/01/cedric-zhang.jpg" width="64" alt="Cedric Zhuang"/></div> <p><!-- /.ts-fab-photo --> </p><div> <div> <div><strong>Cedric Zhuang</strong></div> </div> <p><!-- /.ts-fab-header --> </p><div>I am a senior software developer and have been working in EMC for 8 years. In the latest 4 years, I focus on performance analysis tools for VNX and VNXe like analyzer, the metrics dashboard for VNXe and EMC Storage Analytics.</div> <div></div> <p><!-- /.ts-fab-footer --></p></div> <p><!-- /.ts-fab-text --></p></div> <p><!-- /.ts-fab-wrapper --></p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="http://thecoreblog.emc.com/2015/01/30/getting-know-emc-storage-analytics-3-0/">Getting to know EMC Storage Analytics 3.0</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="http://thecoreblog.emc.com/">Thin Blue Line Blog</a>.</p>
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Welcome to the series of introduction to ESA 3.0 (EMC Storage Analytics).

First things first, what is ESA?  Generally speaking, it’s a monitoring tool for you to keep an eye on the EMC storage resources in your data center, especially virtual environment.

But the storage arrays are shipped with their own software which is designed for the product and has full capability to manage the arrays, why should I use ESA?  Good question!  Imaging that you have 10 VNX/VNXe in your data center and you want to keep an eye on all of them to make sure none of them went wrong.  What would you do?  The simplest way is to open 10 Unisphere (management software for VNX) and your desktop would become something like this:

3-0

Ok, I admit that I made up this picture by using Microsoft Paint. But I guess you get my idea.  It’s not practical to monitor all these arrays in the same time.  Actually you cannot even see the status of all LUNs in one screen if you have more than 50 LUNs in one system.

To make it worse, a typical data center or virtual environment may consists of multiple storage products.  (Like VMAX, VNX, XIO)   Install software of each appliance is already exhausting.  And it’s impossible to monitor the relationship between different appliances in their own management software.  It’s is obvious that we need a unified platform to monitor all these heterogeneous appliances and their relationships.

Another point is, not all of these resources need the precious attention of a human being.  Actually due to the high reliability of EMC storage systems (yeah, I think we agree on that.), IT specialists don’t need to look at these resources all the time.  We just need to know following things:

  • Is anything wrong?
  • Is anything about to go wrong?
  • If anything goes wrong, what should I do?
  • Advanced topic: How can I squeeze more productivity from existing equipment? (In other words, how could I save money?)
  • Other scenarios that I haven’t been considered…

And don’t bother me for anything else.  I don’t need to be told each day that one LUN is working fine and the other pool is still on line.

You get it, that’s when ESA come into use.

In following blogs, we are going to discuss the features of ESA 3.0 and how to make use of them to suit our needs mentioned above.  Some of them may already be available in ESA 2.X.  The others are brand new.  Here are the topics that we are going to cover in following articles.

There is a lot to share here, so please find the full posts on these topics on our EMC Community Network!

About the Author: Cedric Zhuang

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