Storage Management Software: Users Weigh In

“Since we have to monitor multiple systems, it gives us a single pane of glass to look at all of our environments. Also, to compare and contrast, if one environment is having some issues, we can judge it against the other environments to make sure everything is on par with one another. In the financial services industry, customer responsiveness is very important. Financial advisors cannot sit in front of a customer and say, ‘I can't get your data.’ Thus, being up and running and constantly available is a very important area for our client.”

“The tracking of utilization of our storage systems; seeing the throughput—these are the most important metrics for having a working operating system and working storage system. It's centralized. It's got a lot of data in there. We can utilize the data that's in there and the output to other systems to run scripts off of it. Therefore, it's pretty versatile.”

“There was a minor issue where we were receiving a notification that a cluster was not available, or communication to the cluster. OnCommand Manager could not reach a cluster, which is really much like a false positive. The minor issues were communications within the systems.”

“Maybe a little bit more graphical interface. Right now -- and this is going to sound really weird -- but whatever the biggest server is, the one that is utilizing the most storage space, instead of showing me that server and how much storage space, it just shows it to you in a big font. Literally in a big font. That's it. So if your server is named Max and you've got another server named Sue, and Max is taking up most of your space, all it's going to show is just Max is big, Sue is little. That's is really weird, because I really want to see more than that. You can click on Max, drill down in and see the stuff. But I would rather, on my front interface, say, ‘Oh, gosh, Max is using 10 terabytes. Sue is only using one. She's fixing to choke. Let me move some of this over.’”

“We use the SNMP gateway to aggregate hardware and performance events. The alerting feature is valuable because it completes the gap of storage monitoring. Often the storage comes with a tele-diagnostic service. For security purposes, it’s very important for us to be aware of every single failure in order to be more proactive and not only reactive.”
 

“Centralized administration and management of SAN environment in the organization are valuable features. Improvements to my organization include ease of administration and that it fits in well with all the EMC SAN storage”

“It needed improvement with its stability. Also, since it was agent-based communication, we always had to ensure that the agents were running on the servers all the time.”

“The use of agents is not easy. The architectural design of using every single agent for every type of storage can be reviewed with the use of general proxies. The general proxies also discover other vendors’ storage. This can be done with custom made scripts.”