White Paper Getting the Picture: Leveraging Sentry Software Connectors for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization
The days are long gone when datacenter management could be passive in their use of technology to monitor and plan storage capacity. When datacenter administrators do not have enough information, storage capacity planning is notoriously difficult. This leaves IT managers with the unenviable choice of overestimating and overpaying for future storage needs, or risking storage capacity that is overstretched and inviting enterprise-wide failures. Today s large and complex data sets (Big Data) magnify the weakness of the database management tools from just a few years ago. This is not a problem that is exclusive to large enterprises; ineffectively managed IT resources can have a deleterious effect on organizations of any size or net worth. Smart datacenter managers rely upon the latest technology tools that enable forecasting current and future storage capacity needs based upon proven metrics and unbiased data. THE CHALLENGE MANAGING MULTIPLE DATA STORAGE SOLUTIONS Most organizations begin in a similar way they start with modest data storage needs that are solved with relatively simple solutions. As their enterprise continues to grow, they must graduate to larger, more expensive and more complex data storage solutions. While the storage hardware volumes increase in size and complexity, the storage monitoring technology must provide significant improvements to keep pace with these gains. Adding further complication to the above scenario is the fact that organizations acquire storage solutions from multiple vendors in the process of growing their business. Each of these competing storage vendors offers a monitoring solution that, incidentally or intentionally, favors their own hardware. Though these vendor-provided tools often are low-cost or free, the functionality for competitor s hardware is minimal at best, and often nonexistent. The IT administrator is eventually cornered into using multiple monitoring tools to maintain the many, heterogeneous storage products. Each vendor has a different approach to their hardware monitoring tools that makes maintenance extremely confusing, even for the most experienced and competent datacenter manager. Most organizations lack the necessary tools and capabilities to deal with the immense flow of data that needs to be stored. This translates as data bottlenecks, data loss, and sometimes dangerously high risk of compromised data. Customer dissatisfaction invariably follows. Software tools that offer state- of-the-art availability and performance monitoring provide tremendous support to administrators and datacenter managers. These products offer provisioning, workload balancing, optimization, configuration management and management information and constitute a game-changing paradigm that can offer significant uptime for storage infrastructure. The Gartner Group recommends organizations create a holistic, organization-wide strategy for documenting current tools, and acquiring monitoring tools for future use (Market Definition: Availability and Performance Monitoring, Published: 24 February 2012 ID:G00232058, www.gartner.com). A survey conducted by Xiotech polled 185 virtual server administrators on how they build and manage their virtual infrastructure, including the question that had them rank the most difficult issues in managing software and storage. Future capacity planning was chosen as the most difficult issue by 59 respondents, or nearly 32 percent of the survey pool, and 52 administrators -- 28 percent -- chose monitoring storage utilization as their top issue. Allocating storage received 38 votes, or 20 percent, and backing up or replicating virtual server storage received 31 votes, or 17 percent. Only five respondents, or 3 percent, chose migrating datastores as the most difficult issue. (www.storagenewsletter.com) DATACENTER STORAGE DEMANDS CONTINUE RAPID GROWTH Industry analysts agree that the demand for Big Data services and technology will increase, causing significant growth for all aspects of Big Data. According to Storagenewsletter.com, storage is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% between 2011 and 2016. In fact, they state that by 2020, global networks will need to handle 1,000 times more data than they do today. (www.storagenewsletter. com) Organizations that will be positioned to thrive in this highly competitive environment are those who embrace the most effective planning and monitoring tools. Those organizations that hesitate to address their future needs in a timely manner will pay the consequences: Lack of transparency in the management of datacenters Distorted or incomplete view of the entire storage infrastructure resulting in increased expenses Purchase decisions based on apparent demands rather than business impact Higher risk resulting from non-optimized asset utilization Decreased storage performance resulting in poor service quality Poor planning can result in expensive and time-consuming problems. How will your organization succeed and thrive without a deliberate and thoughtful plan? MEETING THE CHALLENGE To succeed in addressing today s data storage marketplace challenges, you need a flexible, transparent and nimble solution that affords you a bird s eye view of your datacenter, allowing you to keep an accurate measure of your metrics and prepare for any upcoming burdens on your infrastructure. Your network will be able to cope with a large data increase if you use capacity optimization in a judicious way; smart capacity management strategies will improve your datacenter s productivity and agility, resulting in significant cost savings and decreased risk.
THE BMC/SENTRY SOFTWARE APPROACH Placing BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization at the center of your heterogeneous data center grants you with a picture of the current and future state of your IT infrastructure. It also efficiently helps decision makers to identify today and tomorrow s needs in service provisioning, asset purchasing as well as infrastructure and business service allocations. The concrete and direct impact on the way IT operations can be proactively improved is then immediately measurable. BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization mainly concentrates on the long term optimization of physical and virtual infrastructure assets. Basically, the BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization model is designed to ensure a durable alignment of the data center capacity with the business demand. The BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization approach also beneficiates from its exclusive partnership with Sentry Software, trusted market leader in the monitoring segment. Sentry Software specifically and exclusively designs software solutions for the BMC frameworks. Already a leading actor in hardware, storage and custom applications monitoring, Sentry Software expanded its line of products to also cover storage capacity optimization by creating a large range of connectors for the BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization platform. The combination of its monitoring, automation, and capacity optimization capabilities for IT infrastructures, makes Sentry Software a key-partner in the storage management marketplace. SENTRY SOFTWARE CONNECTORS FOR BMC TRUESIGHT CAPACITY OPTIMIZATION Real-time configuration, performance and utilization data constitutes the baseline for any accurate capacity calculation. In a standard data center, this data is available from multiple manufacturer s applications sources and system management tools, often placing out-of-reach the global overview any IT administrator needs to efficiently manage its heterogeneous IT infrastructure. Sentry Software has developed ETL technology-based modules for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization (also referred to as Connectors) that enable BMC s solution to gather and analyze capacity information about the most commonly used data storage devices in the market. The Sentry Software s Storage Capacity Optimization solution brings storage capacity metrics into BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization with connectors for Dell Compellent, EMC, Hitachi, HP 3PAR and NetApp. These products extend the value of BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization by introducing storage capacity metrics that were not previously available to users of these technologies. Sentry Connectors for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization are easy to configure, and quickly provide you with a wide range of capacity and performance metrics about your storage and SAN infrastructure that you can leverage for automated analysis and reporting in your BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization environment. Figure 1 - Sentry Software Connectors for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization Once collected, storage performance metrics are brought into the BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization interface to benefit from an easy-to-use environment that enables
you to identify resource/service trends and requirements to deliver consistent performance that meets or exceeds expectations. The Storage Capacity View, available for all the storage devices monitored by the Sentry Software Storage Capacity Optimization solution, provide several types of lists, each of them offering a list of specific devices to help you perform all the basic management operations that you are required to carry on regularly. When you combine the appropriate storage connector(s) for your SAN with Storage Capacity Views and Reports for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization, you can unleash powerful configuration, planning, optimization and reporting capabilities. For example, rather than unnecessarily purchasing additional storage, you can identify unused disks or unmapped volumes and thereby reclaim unused storage space. The connectors also allow for the regular collection of critical capacity data. This gives you the ability to look ahead and avoid unnecessary downtime, outages and storage failures. ANALYZING STORAGE CAPACITY UTILIZATION To control the costs inherent to the growth of storage demand, you need to efficiently plan for future capacity needs and proactively analyze the storage capacity utilization within your SAN. The Storage Capacity Views and Reports for BMC True- Sight Capacity Optimization provides critical capacity metrics such as the Size, Capacity, Subscribed Capacity, Available Capacity and Consumed Capacity to help you get ahead of the ever-growing capacity demand and improve the accuracy of future storage purchases. Figure 2 - Storage Capacity Views and Reports for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization Storage Capacity View Figure 3 - Storage Pools Metrics for a NetApp Filer Figure 4 - Storage System Detailed Information For example, you can easily identify the storage pool that is best adapted to the storage capacity you require by simply search and list the storage systems that meet your allocation requirements and verify their bandwidth capacity and the number of ports available. EVALUATE THE OVERSUBSCRIPTION RISK Sentry Software s Storage Capacity Optimization is also designed to evaluate the oversubscription risk of your monitored storage pools. By default, when the space actually used in a storage pools exceeds 75% and the number of days of saturation overruns 7, the system automatically triggers an alarm. Thanks to the flexibility of the product, the Thresholds settings can be adjusted to meet your specific needs. The capability of the Sentry Connectors for BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization is not limited to the analysis of the storage capacity of your storage environment, it is also designed to help you plan for the future by identifying when storage pools will be exceeding your predetermined threshold levels and in which extend, or by spotting underutilized storage resources that can be brought online. Figure 5 - Oversubscription Situation
The Storage Capacity View displays a wide range of metrics that can help you determine the actual capacity of storage pools. Among the most critical capacity information for storage pools, the Storage Capacity View exposes the total capacity, the total space still available and the space actually consumed. Additionally, a quick look at the Saturation Risk column will tell you if the storage pools are at a risk of being saturated. RECLAIMING UNUSED SPACE In order to derive more value from your existing environment you need to identify, target and free up capacity to address immediate storage growth requirements at a lower cost than new asset acquisition. When the system warns you that you will imminently be running out of storage capacity, and prior to invest in expensive additional storage devices, you can first detect and reclaim unused space from underexploited storage pools. Also, as servers connected to a SAN get decommissioned, you may have an increasing number of unmapped volumes that are no longer used by any server. These volumes, while unused, still occupy disk space in the storage system. Being able to identify such unmapped volumes and reclaim the disk space consumed by these volumes will also help you avoid unnecessary upgrades and extensions of you storage systems. Figure 6 - Capacity Planning with Storage Pools Metrics The Time Since Last Activity parameter also provides a useful indicator on the number of days since when the volume is inactive and can support the decision to return unused storage blocks to the storage pool. Figure 7 - Available Capacity in Storage Pools Figure 8 - Identifying Unmapped Volumes CONCLUSION Virtualization and cloud computing have changed the rules of planning data center capacity and architecture. Today, IT is offered more and more as a service, and constantly changing business needs require IT to adjust continuously and dynamically. Even within drastically overprovisioned environments, no organization is sheltered from performance bottlenecks. The IT department must be able to rely on a comprehensive and real-time overview of the entire data center, including mainframe, physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure elements to obtain concrete measures to achieve better resource utilization. Sentry Software Storage Capacity Optimization is designed to offer IT administrators a full visibility of their datacenters and expose critical storage information within a unified dashboard that monitors and reports on systems capacity across all servers and virtual machines. LEARN MORE Visit Sentry Software Web Site and learn more about our Storage Capacity Optimization solution Watch the Managing Storage Capacity video Read our Storage Capacity Optimization Solution Datasheet
ABOUT MARKETZONE DIRECT PRODUCTS The BMC MarketZone Direct program sells and supports third-party products that complement and/or augment BMC solutions. MarketZone Direct products are available under BMC license and support terms. BUSINESS RUNS ON I.T. I.T. RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30,2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion. ABOUT SENTRY SOFTWARE Sentry Software, a BMC MarketZone Direct and Technology Alliance Partner, provides monitoring solutions that expand and enhance the capabilities of BMC TrueSight Operations Management, thus enabling up to 100-percent coverage of any infrastructure. Sentry Software specializes in single solutions for multi-platform monitoring of hardware, storage, custom applications, or any IT infrastructure component. Its products are deployed in diverse industry sectors around the globe. LEARN MORE To learn more about our solutions, please visit : www.sentrysoftware.com/solutions "Like" us on Facebook: facebook.com/sentrysoftware Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/sentrysoftware Sentry Software products are made exclusively for BMC Software and are marketed, sold and supported by BMC Software as BMC products. They are listed on the BMC Software website products page under the BMC TrueSight Operations Management category. To learn more about BMC TrueSight Operations Management, please visit www.bmc.com BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 2012 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved.