3PAR friendly SAN monitoring software

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Richard Siemers
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3PAR friendly SAN monitoring software

Post by Richard Siemers »

I've been on the hunt for an application that will monitor and report (not manage) our SAN assets end to end. Specifically, logging SAN port utilization at the hosts, ISLs, storage ports, and on through the array to the physical disks.

We looked at Akorri Balance Point which boasted 3PAR support, and completely agentless deployment. I liked that the software was able to login to VMware, AIX HMCs, and use Windows WMI to get host stats. The SAN switch monitoring was weak at best, and pulled the majority of its data from the array and the hosts. Unfortunately, their product was not updated to work with 3PAR beyond Inserv version 2.24... eta for 2.31 support was late 2011/early 2012.

So we moved on to Netapp SAN Screen, also agentless, and also boasts 3PAR support. This app does a much better job with the switches. It pulls zones/aliases/port performance and this data appears to be core to its host discovery. Other than VMware, it doesnt pull data directly from hosts, instead it uses zones and alias information to identify ports assigned to hosts (and storage) and attributes those metrics to the host. One very nice feature of SAN Screen that I find usefull in a 3par environment is the "Balance Index", which alerts you to hosts that are not properly set to round-robin. It compared the throughput between all ports assigned to a host and triggers based on a balance threshold you set. VMware servers and Windows 2008 environments can benefit from this as those two operatings systems require admin intervention to set RR policies on the luns. However like Balance Point, they over state their 3PAR compatability as well. In our testing using version 6.2, it was able to pull configuration information from the 3par, however performance collection is still in engineering/development with a early 2012 target. Of the configuration data pulled, some of the field desciptions are still a little off and seem to be based on the Netapp storage model. It looks for "spare" disks and flags the 3par as vunerable because it has no disks set as spare (every disk in the 3par has some space set aside for hot spare, so no single spindle is idle). Everytime a host reboots, it reports someone made masking changes on the 3par, not recognizing that masking is a dynamic event on the 3par. Also every time a thin provisioned volume allocates more space, it reports that as a change in LUN size, even though the actuall virtual lun size stays the same.

Aside from the SANscreen's still-in-development 3PAR support, I have found the tool quite usefull for cleaning up the switch side of the house. Pruning old zones, fixing incorrect host aliases, identifying balance issues with MPIO settings, logging changes made to the switches, storage, and VMware and more. I expect the product will double in usefullness once the 3par collection tools are perfected.
Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
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