srm3.0 fund3 srg

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Welcome to Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite Fundamentals. Copyright 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011,2012, 2013 , 2014 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED AS IS. EMC CORPORATION MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. EMC2, EMC, Data Domain, RSA, EMC Centera, EMC ControlCenter, EMC LifeLine, EMC OnCourse, EMC Proven, EMC Snap, EMC SourceOne, EMC Storage Administrator, Acartus, Access Logix, AdvantEdge, AlphaStor, ApplicationXtender, ArchiveXtender, Atmos, Authentica, Authentic Problems, Automated Resource Manager, AutoStart, AutoSwap, AVALONidm, Avamar, Captiva, Catalog Solution, C-Clip, Celerra, Celerra Replicator, Centera, CenterStage, CentraStar, ClaimPack, ClaimsEditor, CLARiiON, ClientPak, Codebook Correlation Technology, Common Information Model, Configuration Intelligence, Configuresoft, Connectrix, CopyCross, CopyPoint, Dantz, DatabaseXtender, Direct Matrix Architecture, DiskXtender, DiskXtender 2000, Document Sciences, Documentum, elnput, E-Lab, EmailXaminer, EmailXtender, Enginuity, eRoom, Event Explorer, FarPoint, FirstPass, FLARE, FormWare, Geosynchrony, Global File Virtualization, Graphic Visualization, Greenplum, HighRoad, HomeBase, InfoMover, Infoscape, Infra, InputAccel, InputAccel Express, Invista, Ionix, ISIS, Max Retriever, MediaStor, MirrorView, Navisphere, NetWorker, nLayers, OnAlert, OpenScale, PixTools, Powerlink, PowerPath, PowerSnap, QuickScan, Rainfinity, RepliCare, RepliStor, ResourcePak, Retrospect, RSA, the RSA logo, SafeLine, SAN Advisor, SAN Copy, SAN Manager, Smarts, SnapImage, SnapSure, SnapView, SRDF, StorageScope, SupportMate, SymmAPI, SymmEnabler, Symmetrix, Symmetrix DMX, Symmetrix VMAX, TimeFinder, UltraFlex, UltraPoint, UltraScale, Unisphere, VMAX, Vblock, Viewlets, Virtual Matrix, Virtual Matrix Architecture, Virtual Provisioning, VisualSAN, VisualSRM, Voyence, VPLEX, VSAM-Assist, WebXtender, xPression, xPresso, YottaYotta, the EMC logo, and where information lives, are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. Revision Date: February 2014 Revision Number: MR-1WN-SRMFUN.3.0.3.0

1 Storage Resource Management Suite Fundamentals


This course covers an introduction to the Storage Resource Management Suite including an overview of the challenges storage managers face, the architecture of SRM, and the features that help SRM satisfy the needs of the storage manager.



This module introduces the challenges and business propositions that drive the use of the SRM Suite, including identification of some important use cases and the benefits derived from the depth of funcitonality that comprises the SRM Suite.



Our world is changing fast and datacenter innovations are rapidly falling behind. New web based applications and technologies are driving new revenue streams. With advances in mobile computing, end users now expect to consume a wide range of content and applications from both personal, as well as corporate issued devices, at anytime day or night. Organizations also expect new applications to drive new business outcomes. More information about customers likes and preferences must be captured and mined. By 2020, the data managed by enterprises is expected to grow to over 40 Zeta Bytes. New customer engagement models have evolved, setting expectations that applications will be easily accessible via the internet and always available. As a result, IT must maintain increasing service levels at lower costs, and bring new services on-line faster just to meet these new business expectations.



Rapid data growth combined with increased service level expectations introduces new management challenges. Continuously evolving IT environments frequently lead to orphaned or under utilized storage resources. Rapid adoption of virtualization and cloud technologies have reduced visibility into service dependencies, health, and performance. IT frequently lacks the ability to quickly understand who is using capacity, how much they are using, if the right tier of service level is being used, and when more resources will be required. The traditional silo forms of infrastructure management lead to higher capital and operational costs, often resulting in too much time being spent with lengthy problem resolution times.



In order to meet these new challenges, IT must transform the way they deliver services. This includes storage management. EMC recommends three steps for transforming storage services. First, is to automate the delivery of storage services based on defined policies. This will enable IT to lower operational costs, eliminate human error, consistently align with design best practices, and roll out new services faster. Second, is to implement an extensible and open management framework that enables IT to optimize existing investments while supporting software defined storage in the future. Third, IT must implement a monitoring solution that provides visibility across compute, network, and storage domains that allows organizations to quickly identify problems and assess business impact. These three steps provide IT with a simpler, scalable, storage management solution.



IT managers generally have three key concerns when managing IT infrastructure: meeting SLAs, controlling costs, and increasing business agility. Meeting SLAs requires the ability to understand end-to-end relationships and service dependencies. It also requires insight into end-to-end performance trends and compliance with configuration best practices and interoperability guidelines to ensure the environment is always configured correctly to meet service levels. Controlling costs requires the ability to identify under-utilized resources and track capacity consumption trends to improve capacity planning. Enhancing business agility means rolling out new applications and solving problems faster. When discussing the SRM Suite, you can catagorize these features into three general areas: Visualize, Analyze, and Optimize.



The SRM Suite is a solution that is specifically designed to meet the challenges unique to managing the IT infrastructure. The SRM Suite enables our customers to visualize application to storage dependencies and performance, analyze configurations and capacity growth, and optimize their environment to improve return on investments. This allows our customers to address many of today's common management issues from a common presentation layer and reporting application. Throughout the remainder of this course, we will take a look at how this applies to some common use cases such as performance reporting and analysis, capacity planning and reporting, chargeback reporting, configuration compliance monitoring, and multi-tenant SLA reporting.



The SRM Suite provides enterprise views of the storage environment enabling enhanced decision making and operational control, driving efficiency, and improving service levels. The storage resource management shared principles are to:

1. Enable collaboration of Storage Administration functions with data center teams for better planning, business insight, and automation. 2. Expose key performance indicators, configuration information, and storage capacity analysis data to enable cross-domain consistency. 3. Simplify and increase ease of use of EMC products through the adoption of the EMC Common User Experience (ECUE). 4. Extend broad platform coverage via a set of standard interfaces to discover hosts, switches, and storage arrays regardless of vendor.



The SRM Suite provides customers with comprehensive end-to-end analysis and reporting in heterogeneous environments for compute, network, and storage. The total solution begins with discovery of topology and extraction of configuration data to determine and map relationships for supported devices. Polling of devices in the topology is established to gather data to provide performance, availability, and capacity management. Comparison of results to rule based policies can then be used to report on compliance to best practices, mandatory requirements, and the EMC support matrix. Reports include alerts when policy requirements are breached.



The SRM Suite supports EMC storage, third-party storage, and a comprehensive set of operating systems with PowerPath and Vblock converged infrastructures. Support in the SRM Suite extends to Cisco and Brocade SAN switches, Oracle and SQL Server database applications, and powerful platforms such as ViPR, DPA, and Virtual Wisdom.



EMC offers three powerful solutions to help customers simplify storage management. EMCs SRM Suite provides a comprehensive set of tools for storage teams to optimize their environment while meeting service level agreements. The Service Assurance Suite extends visibility to the compute and network domains, enabling IT operations teams to manage service levels and optimize resources. ViPR adds software-defined storage that offers a revolutionary approach to storage automation and management to transform existing heterogeneous physical storage into a simple, extensible, and open virtual storage platform. ViPR automates storage provisioning through policy based, self-service access to these virtual storage arrays. Combined with the SRM Suite, it centralizes storage management across all physical and virtual storage environments that includes both EMC and third party storage arrays. The SRM Suite, Service Assurance Suite, and ViPR share a common presentation layer and reporting environment to further simplify storage management and reporting.



This module covered some of the challenges facing management and the benefits derived from use of an integrated, end-to-end host-to-storage management solution. Highlighted are some of the use cases that the SRM Suite addresses and a discussion of how the SRM Suite is used to achieve total storage configuration management.



This module focuses on an overview of the architecture, key terminology, and components of the SRM Suite.



The SRM Suite is by default, an agentless application using various methods to collect data from the underlying infrastructure it discovers. The architecture of the SRM Suite is comprised of three components and described at a high level:

The SRM Frontend web portal is a virtual machine providing the end user interface for alert management, viewing performance metrics, viewing storage capacity information, and running reports.

The Backend is a virtual machine used to store data received from the collectors. This data includes events, compliance, topology, and metric information. Backends are categorized as Primary or Additional. Each instance of SRM may only have one Primary Backend. The Primary Backend has unique modules to handle alerts, topology mapping of SAN objects, and load balancing. The additional Backends share the load of processing data from the collectors in heavily loaded systems.

SRM collectors retrieve information about applications, SAN objects, and connectivity in the datacenter and send it to the backend for storage in the database. The Frontend will pull data stored in the Backend database and display it in the GUI for the end user.

The SRM Suite architecture provides data for various use cases of storage management across various switches, hosts, and arrays in the SAN. This includes EMC arrays, third party arrays, and visibility through the VMware environment up to the application stack.



The SRM Suite is made of several components, called modules, that work together to collect data from the network infrastructure, process the data, and display reports to the users. Depending on the environment, the SRM Suite can be scaled with additional modules in a variety of configurations. To collect the data inside a Collector-Manager, there are discrete collectors that can handle a specific type of polling (SNMP, XML, REST, TXT, VMware, and Smarts, etc). The collectors periodically poll and connect to devices to collect data, filter and or enrich the data, and pass the data on to the backend. The APG-Backend processes the data, computes aggregates where necessary, and maintains the database. The database receives the processed data, places it in the appropriate storage location, and stores the metric properties for retrieval. The SRM web portal is used to log into the application and provides administrative access, report generation and creation, and data retrieval.

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SRM may be installed using an ovf file or a binary file. The ovf install option contains and deploys a 64-bit hardened version of SuSe Linux on each virtual machine deployed in the vApp. This version of the Linux operating environment is scanned, cleaned, and maintained by EMC. There is a template that is used with the ovf installation that assists the installer with critical information that must be supplied to the application to ensure its ability to function properly once the deployment is complete. Although, ovf deployments permit either 1 or 4 virtual machines to be created at deployment time, single virtual machine installs are useful in small sites or for proof of concept activities.

Four virtual machine deployments are managed by a virtual appliance and will consist of the Frontend, Primary Backend, additional Backend, and Collector SRM components. Four virtual machine deployments are made in larger scale deployments and are useful for Enterprise environments. However, if a vApp deployment needs to be extended in a large environment, additional single virtual machine installs can be added as additional Backends to the instance scaling the deployment to a satisfactory level.

The binary installation is a more flexible environment when compared to ovf deployments. There are a greater number of supported platforms and no hard limit on the number of virtual machines that can be deployed, but a binary deployment requires more support and maintenance from the customer. The customer must provide the operating system for the application. There are a limited number of Operating Systems that SRM is currently supporting and the support matrix for the product should be checked to ensure that any intended deployment will be on a supported platform. The customer is also responsible for maintenance activity such as patch updates, virus detection, and vulnerability management to ensure that the SRM application will not experience unexpected downtime or errors due to poor maintenance after the installation is complete. Although a binary installation permits any number of virtual machines to be included in a deployment, only one Frontend, one Primary Backend, and one Collector may be installed per deployment. To scale out the installation, any number of Additional Backends may then be installed in the deployment using the binary deployment model. It should be noted that only binary deployments are used for upgrades.



This module covered the SRM Suite application including the architecture and primary functionality of the virtual machines and components that make up the application. Options for installation of the application were also covered in this module.



This module focuses on describing the key features and capabilities of the SRM Suite and identifying how those features may be used in an infrastructure management environment.



Performance and availability analysis spans from the application, in this case an Oracle database, to the virtual or physical host, through the SAN switches and down into the array. No other vendor provides this breadth of coverage with a completely agent-less solution. The SRM Suite provides detailed topology and relationship views to help understand the service dependencies and to reduce time spent on planning and trouble-shooting processes.

It also provides comprehensive end-to-end representation of the infrastructure and analysis of performance, health, and availability with the goal of improved service level compliance and administrative productivity. This level of visibility, predominately provided through storage reporting with customizable reports through the user interface, has become a necessity for assuring service levels in todays rapidly growing and increasingly complex environments.



More than half of all SAN outages are due to configuration errors. The SRM Suite Storage Compliance solution pack continuously monitors compliance with your design best practices and the EMC Support Matrix to avoid costly down time and reduce the time spent planning and managing changes to the environment. SRM storage compliance enables you to proactively identify configuration issues that can impact services and ensure your SAN is always configured correctly to meet your required service levels.



The Storage Compliance solution pack addresses storage configuration compliance and change management challenges. It performs change tracking, best practice validation, and checks interoperability standards of the SAN against the EMC support matrix using agent-less discovery to simplify management and reduce deployment times. When SAN changes breach configuration policies, the violation is noted by the SRM Suite. The count and severity of these rule breaches is presented in the SRM Suite user interface. SRM Suite storage compliance proactively detects infrastructure vulnerabilities to assure customers they will maintain compliance with internal configuration policies, vendor guidelines, and industry best practices. Storage Compliance further minimizes operational costs by reducing time spent on resolving configuration issues and downtime associated with human error.



The SRM Suite helps you analyze capacity growth to control costs with reporting that extends across data center sites and heterogeneous storage environments. For EMC VMAX and VNX arrays, you can define service levels based on array model type, disk interface technology, RAID type, disk size, or FAST policy. The SRM Suite enables you to track the true cost of supporting an application by allowing you to group hosts by application or department and discover all primary volumes for those hosts including their snaps and replicas.



The SRM Suite helps improve FAST policy decisions. You can view the service-level or FAST policy for each LUN attached to a host and analyze the historical throughput, response time, and IOs per second to determine if you have selected the right service level. By analyzing these performance trends, you can identify the application storage and investigate the possibility of moving one or more LUNs to lower cost storage without violating SLAs. If the investigation shows that one or more LUNs could be migrated, then review the Service Level Capacity report to determine if enough storage space is available in the target tier.



Chargeback reports are an effective means of aligning the cost of service delivery with business requirements. After all, people generally want the highest level of service until they have to pay for it. Having the ability to quickly identify the cost of delivering storage services, enables organizations to make better decisions on service-level requirements.

For example, chargeback reports can be created inside the SRM Suite user interface using data acquired from storage reports showing business units with aggregate capacity based on application or department use. Chargeback reporting then breaks down each class of service to show the total cost of supporting an application or department including all copies and snapshots.



The SRM Suite's custom reporting allows you to visualize, analyze, and optimize multi-tenant infrastructures by quickly creating reports for different clients, users, and roles. Through the user interface component, employing an HTML 5 multi-tenant user interface, creates unique views accessible on a wide range of modern communication devices.



This module covered a discussion of the key features and capabilities of the SRM Suite and identification of their usage and the components that support use in an IT infrastructure.



This module focuses on a description of how to use the SRM Suite to manage a datacenter infrastructure.



What if you could do the following?

Understand ALL storage relationships, dependencies, and application impacts.

Assure storage related service level agreements and Chargeback for those services.

Optimize storage investments to control costs and improve productivity. The SRM Suite can help achieve solutions to these common infrastructure management challenges.

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Problem - A storage administrator needs to add new capacity to a host supporting a production application. Discovering what service-level the host is using, which LUNs and arrays the application resides on, and if there is enough capacity in that service-level on the array to meet the administrators requirements can take hours of analysis.

Solution - The SRM Suite provides end-to-end views that help administrators quickly identify the relationships between applications and the storage services they live on. It also reports on host capacity by service level to quickly identify the class of service used to support an application. The SRM Suite will also help administrators quickly find storage pools of the right capacity that meet defined service-levels to support new application requirements.

Value - Automating the key processes of identifying end-to-end relationships, the type of storage being used, and the available capacity that meets service-level requirements reduces the time it takes to complete these tasks from hours down to just a few minutes.



Problem - Frequently, hosts share and compete for resources such as bandwidth from a switch or IO for a group of disks. As the workloads from an application increase, it can impact other applications that share these resources. Our customers tell us that identifying the applications contending for resources and all of the impacted applications can often times take days to weeks.

Solution - The SRM Suite provides analysis that allows you to quickly spot bottlenecks in a data path. It also enables you to quickly identify which hosts share what resources and to analyze the associated workloads to identify possible overloading of a shared resource. With this analysis you can be more proactive in distributing the load more evenly to avoid bottlenecks.

Value - Automating the key processes for identifying end-to-end relationships, bottlenecks, and contributors to those bottlenecks reduces the time it takes to troubleshoot performance issues from hours and weeks to minutes and hours. The ability to more effectively distribute workloads improves your ability to assure service levels.



Problem - While virtual or thin provisioning helps improve storage utilization by allocating capacity on demand from common pools, this common pool is typically oversubscribed, meaning that more capacity is allocated to hosts than is actually available within the pool. Since most hosts use less capacity than actually allocated, thin provisioning improves data storage utilization. However, application outages can occur if the thin pool runs out of capacity and an application attempts to write new data to it. While thin provisioning can improve utilization and delay new capacity purchases until more capacity is required, it also must be managed to ensure the thin pool does not run out of capacity to avoid unplanned outages.

Solution - The SRM Suite tracks capacity consumption for thin pools and RAID groups across all discovered arrays and data centers. Utilization is shown with red and yellow indicators to identify when user defined thresholds are exceeded and to quickly spot pools running out of capacity. Green indicators show that consumption levels are currently safe.

For each Storage Pool, SRM predicts The number of days until full to identify when new capacity will be required. And, it shows the array name and disk type for that pool so you can quickly determine where, what type, and when new capacity will be required.

Value - Automated tracking of pool and RAID group consumption simplifies the management of thin pools to improve productivity and create broader use of thin provisioning to improve capacity utilization and lower capital expenses. It also improves capacity planning by enabling just in time purchasing to reduce acquisition and operational costs.



As you increase your use of virtual provisioning to improve utilization, the SRM Suite helps you track pool utilization trends to identify when pools will become full. Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and FAST for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) will enable you to identify capacity mix by storage group to improve SLA support through FAST policy decisions. The SRM Suite can track capacity consumption by storage tier to identify when new capacity will be needed by a tier to improve capacity planning processes. The SRM Suite dashboard takes you through a flow of analysis in support of capacity planning to determine:

What is the my raw capacity? How did I configure usable space? Of the usable space, how much is used, how much is free, and how is

capacity changing over time? For the capacity being used, how is it being used? The dashboard can show

usage by Service Level, by Purpose, etc. Are there any conditions that I need to be aware of? For example, are

there storage pools that are close to running low or are out of space?



With the SRM Suite, you can view a report that proactively identifies SLAs at risk as well as those that have failed and require immediate action.



Assure storage SLAs by analyzing storage consumption and trending in service level capacities to deliver storage service levels that are aligned with application requirements. For example, assure the FAST VP service level is available for allocation to higher priority applications. If this service level is fully used, a service level with devices that are compatible with the application I/O demand may be used to service the application. A good choice could be the silver service level which contains high capacity, fast, and reliable Fiber Channel devices. The benefit of having the data displayed in these reports is that the end user is able to have a single view with two tables yielding all the necessary information to assure storage SLAs through capacity planning, resolving capacity issues, and identifying potential or current performance bottlenecks.



The SRM Suite can be used to search and view topology from the host through the intervening infrastructure and into the storage topology itself using the SRM Suite topology map utility. We can see there is only one data path on an ESX server which seems odd for a virtual machine host of an Oracle database. When we look at the performance graph for this host, we can see some spikes which may explain why the Oracle instance is experiencing difficulties. Investigating this ESX Server configuration within the Storage Compliance component of the SRM Suite, shows us that this configuration is in violation of a multi-path policy. The I/O Path Redundancy rule for this policy requires at least two paths for the server. Now that we have identified the potential issue for our Oracle instance, we can remediate the situation.



Keep in mind, when charging for storage services, you need to identify the true cost of application storage. To help with understanding storage usage, map it to Service Levels appropriate for the application. It is important to understand the range of relationships from storage to the hosts or clusters. In this example, how would you charge for the data storage consumed by the application? Consider the following:

Snapshots support the application directly, so they should be charged to the application.

Local copies for application backup should be charged to the application owner, not the backup server, despite mapping.

A local copy for development servers should probably be charged to the application as well.

Remote copies should be charged to the application too, since they will be used in the event of an outage to recover the application remotely.

With the SRM Suite, you can determine all the supporting copies, even if they are mapped/masked to a different server (like the backup server). Total chargeback for the application storage should include all of this capacity.



This module covered the use of the SRM Suite to meet some of the challenges facing management. Highlighted is an analysis of the use cases that the SRM Suite fulfills including understanding relationships and dependencies between storage and applications, dealing with SLAs and chargeback requirements, and optimizing the infrastructure to control costs and improve productivity.



This course covered an introduction to the challenges and business propositions that drive the use of the SRM Suite. We identified some important use cases and the benefits derived from the combination of components that make up the SRM Suite. This course also included an overview of the SRM Suites architecture, features, and functionality.


srm3.0 fund3 srg

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