It has been years since the introduction of storage-dedicated networks in IT departments. SANs, with disk arrays, fiber switches and dedicated tape libraries have been put in place to provide advanced storage services to servers and applications, to isolate the storage issues from the servers and consolidate the storage needs in one place. With the growing use and deployment of virtual systems and blade servers (with little to no storage capacity), the SAN has become a critical piece of the IT architecture and constitutes in many cases a single point of failure for many applications.
Despite becoming increasingly critical, the monitoring and management of the SAN and its underlying components are still at the Stone Age: vendor specific consoles, heterogeneous level of information, no integration with other monitoring tools, different interfaces, etc. This situation makes the management of multi-vendor SANs quite a challenge to IT departments.
When an application starts performing poorly and happens to rely on a SAN, administrators struggle to isolate the performance bottleneck, whether it is at the level of the server, or a broken multi-path setup, or a broken RAID or a late backup overloading the fiber link. Sometimes even for simply detecting a failed disk, a broken power supply or a link down, administrators have to deal with a multitude of different tools and interfaces, leading to longer time to repair and lower uptime.
Sentry Software has taken its popular hardware monitoring solution for BMC Performance Manager and extended it to cover not only servers but also storage devices: disk arrays, fiber switches, filers and tape libraries.
Integrated as a native module for BMC Performance Manager (both agent-based “PATROL” and agent-less BMC Portal), Sentry Software’s solution monitors the physical aspects of all SAN components. It reports hardware failures, monitors key performance metrics and helps you diagnose any availability issue in the SAN. Sentry Software’s hardware monitoring products which already supports servers from DELL, IBM, HP, Sun, Fujitsu and NEC now also supports storage devices from EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Brocade, Cisco, LSI, Emulex, QLogic, NetApp, StorageTek, Quantum and ADIC. All your servers and storage devices are now monitored in a central place with a unified interface. No more integration headaches or holes in the monitoring coverage!
Successful BSM implementations depend on a well-instrumented infrastructure that supplies relevant information about critical performance, availability, and throughput. Sentry Software’s storage monitoring solution facilitates the achievement of BSM objectives as it consolidates several tools into one product that provides a consistent monitoring configuration methodology and uses a common management method to optimize your IT infrastructure.
BMC Performance Manager – Storage Monitoring is fully integrated with BMC Performance Manager environment, which in turn is integrated with BMC Service Impact Manager and BMC Event Manager. As a result, you can access both infrastructure performance and availability metrics and business impact information in an easy-to–use interface.
© 2008 Sentry Software
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