Storage Resource Management

OK, so the bosses are now thinking it would be a great service to go into
client sites and do a storage analysis for clients. I'm thinking I could go
in with a 1U server with a QFE and perhaps a FC card, plug it into the
network, point it at the servers with storage, come back the next day/week,
and give them an analysis of their storage use. Key information I would be
looking for includes duplicate and infrequently accessed data. Nice to have
features include plugins for Exchange, Oracle, MS SQL, and Netapp, along
with published database schema so I can write my own queries. Ease of
installation and removal of the agents, cross-platform support, and low
agent overhead is critical. I don't want this thing screwing up the
clients' environments.

Also, I have a question on how these tools generally gather their
information. How closely do the agents rely on the underlying filesystem?
For example, if someone has turned on noatime for a UFS filesystem, does
that mean that I can't collect access time information, or do agents put
something in between the filesystem and OS to collect and report inode
access and operations?

If anyone has any information, reports, white papers, etc. comparing the
different offerings out there, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
--paul

In article _ytsb.7$3j.6@lakeread01,
says...

OK, so the bosses are now thinking it would be a great service to go into
client sites and do a storage analysis for clients. I'm thinking I could go
in with a 1U server with a QFE and perhaps a FC card, plug it into the
network, point it at the servers with storage, come back the next day/week,
and give them an analysis of their storage use. Key information I would be
looking for includes duplicate and infrequently accessed data. Nice to have
features include plugins for Exchange, Oracle, MS SQL, and Netapp, along
with published database schema so I can write my own queries. Ease of
installation and removal of the agents, cross-platform support, and low
agent overhead is critical. I don't want this thing screwing up the
clients' environments.

Also, I have a question on how these tools generally gather their
information. How closely do the agents rely on the underlying filesystem?
For example, if someone has turned on noatime for a UFS filesystem, does
that mean that I can't collect access time information, or do agents put
something in between the filesystem and OS to collect and report inode
access and operations?

If anyone has any information, reports, white papers, etc. comparing the
different offerings out there, I would greatly appreciate it.

this is the only profitable model that we've found (so far) for selling
SRM (buying the package & then selling it as a service) since customers
seem to balk at SRMs high price (usually higher than adding more storage

we use the Overland package (the package that they OEM/private label
from Astrum (EMC just bought Astrum)

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/ . | 310-544-9439 / 310-544-9309 fax . . . o
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NAS/SAN/RAID from HP, IBM, Seagate, EMC, QLogic, ATL, OverLand Data

CreekPath's monitoring piece is very good, seen it in action myself.

I hear Storability has a good one as well. Saw their demo and the
monitoring aspect was good but they didn't have the provisioning I
needed so they were out of the running early.

Either of these will delve down into the tablespaces of db's, don't
know about Exchange though. I believe both have NetApp agents now as
well.

These 2 products rely on the filesystem, which is good in that there's
no inserting of wild monkey drivers but you're proposed scenario would
suffer.

I would go CreekPath, my $.02.

~F

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 11:52:10 -0500, "Paul" pgaljan_delete_between the
wrote:

OK, so the bosses are now thinking it would be a great service to go into
client sites and do a storage analysis for clients. I'm thinking I could go
in with a 1U server with a QFE and perhaps a FC card, plug it into the
network, point it at the servers with storage, come back the next day/week,
and give them an analysis of their storage use. Key information I would be
looking for includes duplicate and infrequently accessed data. Nice to have
features include plugins for Exchange, Oracle, MS SQL, and Netapp, along
with published database schema so I can write my own queries. Ease of
installation and removal of the agents, cross-platform support, and low
agent overhead is critical. I don't want this thing screwing up the
clients' environments.

Also, I have a question on how these tools generally gather their
information. How closely do the agents rely on the underlying filesystem?
For example, if someone has turned on noatime for a UFS filesystem, does
that mean that I can't collect access time information, or do agents put
something in between the filesystem and OS to collect and report inode
access and operations?

If anyone has any information, reports, white papers, etc. comparing the
different offerings out there, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
--paul

check out BrightStor Storage Resource Manager. It would fit the bill based
on your requirements; and could be easily managed from a central
environment.

-mrl

"Faeandar" wrote in message
...
CreekPath's monitoring piece is very good, seen it in action myself.

I hear Storability has a good one as well. Saw their demo and the
monitoring aspect was good but they didn't have the provisioning I
needed so they were out of the running early.

Either of these will delve down into the tablespaces of db's, don't
know about Exchange though. I believe both have NetApp agents now as
well.

These 2 products rely on the filesystem, which is good in that there's
no inserting of wild monkey drivers but you're proposed scenario would
suffer.

I would go CreekPath, my $.02.

~F

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 11:52:10 -0500, "Paul" pgaljan_delete_between the
wrote:

OK, so the bosses are now thinking it would be a great service to go into
client sites and do a storage analysis for clients. I'm thinking I could
go
in with a 1U server with a QFE and perhaps a FC card, plug it into the
network, point it at the servers with storage, come back the next
day/week,
and give them an analysis of their storage use. Key information I would
be
looking for includes duplicate and infrequently accessed data. Nice to
have
features include plugins for Exchange, Oracle, MS SQL, and Netapp, along
with published database schema so I can write my own queries. Ease of
installation and removal of the agents, cross-platform support, and low
agent overhead is critical. I don't want this thing screwing up the
clients' environments.

Also, I have a question on how these tools generally gather their
information. How closely do the agents rely on the underlying
filesystem?
For example, if someone has turned on noatime for a UFS filesystem, does
that mean that I can't collect access time information, or do agents put
something in between the filesystem and OS to collect and report inode
access and operations?

If anyone has any information, reports, white papers, etc. comparing the
different offerings out there, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
--paul