Just as you regularly monitor and manage other infrastructure in your data center, you also need to manage and monitor your Storage Area Network (SAN).
MONITORING YOUR SAN
Monitoring will alert you to possible issues before they become problems, and will help you collect data to determine if your SAN is meeting internal or external customer service level agreements (SLAs). Monitoring will also help you identify the fine tuning necessary for your SAN to deliver maximum return on investment (ROI). Plan to monitor the following:
Error and Informational Messages
These messages inform you of status and state changes. Your product reference manuals will contain detailed lists of messages with descriptions, probable causes, and recommended actions.
Switch
- Online/offline ports
- Power supply status
Fabric
- Fabric logins
- Fabric reconfigures
Storage Devices and Hosts
- Volume and Logical Unit Number (LUN) changes
- HBA online/offline
Thresholds
You can set and monitor thresholds across your SAN, including:
Switch
- Port performance and errors
- Environmental functions (i.e., temperature, power, etc.)
- Operational values for GBICs
Fabric
- End-to-end performance
- SCSI reads/writes
- LUN performance
Storage Devices and Hosts
- Storage capacity
- File system performance
- Volume capacity
SAN MANAGEMENT
Regular and proactive management is important to ensure your SAN operates smoothly. There are three main types of common management tasks:
Switch
- Hardware and software configuration
- Licensing installation and policy definition
- Performance setting for 1 Gbit/sec vs. 2 Gbit/sec ports
Fabric
- Ease-of-management group definition
- Zoning definition
- ISL configuration
Storage Devices and Hosts
- Volume configuration
- LUN configuration
- File system configuration
- HBA configuration
- Performance
MANAGEMENT AND MONITORING TOOLS
Ultimately, your business requirements and customer commitments should drive the tools you need. Also, you should decide what interface and level of integration you prefer. Ideally, your SAN infrastructure provides you the following choices for greatest flexibility, ease of management/monitoring, and integration into other management products:
- Web-based products for switch management and monitoring tasks
- Integration into a comprehensive SAN tool set additionally addressing host and storage device management and monitoring
- Integration into an enterprise-level IT infrastructure management framework
Look for SAN component vendors that include Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and have established broad industry partnerships. This will allow you to pick best-in-class tools that work together to meet your requirements most effectively.
With the proper tools and procedures in place, you'll find that monitoring and managing your SAN quickly and becomes a part of your day-to-day activities, just like the other infrastructure in your data center.
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