FREE TUTOIRS SUPPORT BY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

FREE TUTOIRS SUPPORT BY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

As explained in the previous section, a storage network raises numerous questions for and imposes many requirements upon a management system. Many software manufacturers tackle individual aspects of this problem and offer various management systems that address the various problem areas. Some management systems concern themselves more with the commercial aspects, whereas others tend to concentrate upon administrative interests. Still other management systems specialize in certain components of the storage network such as applications, resources, data or the network itself. This results in numerous different system management products being used in a complex and heterogeneous storage network. The lack of a comprehensive management system increases the complexity of and the costs involved in system management. Analysts therefore assume that in addition to the simple costs for hardware and software of a storage network, up to ten times these costs will have to be spent upon its management. In this context it makes sense to develop a management system which makes it possible for as many aspects of the storage network as possible to be managed from a central point by means of a management console. In order to guarantee the management of all components, a management system must operate the existing interfaces of applications and resources and – where this is not possible – try to integrate existing management mechanisms into the central software or to re-establish them. In order to permit the full management of a storage network in daily operation, a management system should have the following five core components: • Discovery The task of a discovery component is to recognize the applications and resources used in the storage network. It collects information about the properties and the current configuration of resources. Finally, it correlates and evaluates all gathered information and supplies the data for the representation of the network topology. • Monitoring The monitoring components are used to monitor the status of the applications and resources of the network. In the event of an application crash or the failure of a resource, it must take appropriate measures to raise the alert based upon the severity of the error that has occurred. The monitoring components operate error isolation by trying to find the actual cause of the fault in the event of the failure of part of the storage network.

• Configuration The configuration of applications and resources can be changed by the configuration components. They further make it possible to simulate in advance the effects of changing the configuration.

• Analysis This allows trend analyses, in particular of the commercial aspects, to be called up. It also evaluates the availability and scalability requirements of the storage network. However, it can also be used to track down single points of failure within the storage network.

• Data control These components are concerned with all aspects of data such as performance, backups, archiving or migration and thus control the efficient use and availability of data and resources. By using policies it allows the administrator to control the flow and placement of data. In the following we want to deal in more detail with the mechanisms that are needed for the first three core components: discovery, monitoring and configuration. Due to the complexity of the methods used in the analysis component it is not possible to deal with these in detail. A model – storage virtualization – has already been introduced to deal with the requirements that crop up for the data control component