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BVQ Unified Storage Platform?

With this BVQ Version version we introduce one major step towards a massive easement for connections of BVQ to your Business Intelligence (BI) or IT Systems Management (ITSM) solutions.

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To address that issue, we created the a unified data model with general object types that are linked to specific object types from different platformsof our existing platform specific models. For example a Block Storage Volume of the BVQ Unified Storage Model is linked to a VDsik VDisk of the IBM Sepctrum Spectrum virtualize platform, a LUN of the Netapp NetApp ONTAP platform and a LUN of the Dell EMC Unity platform.  The same appears to such an object's attributes and performance statistics of general object types.

All models coexist in BVQ. We The BVQ Unified Modela coexists in parallel to the platform specific models and we still kept the specific models to be as excat exact and near to the platform vendor models as possible. The Unified model coexists to the platform specific models in parallel. With that we can always support any platform specific feature in BVQ without a need to extend or change the Unified model. In addition a specific model .

BVQ for Dell EMC Unity use cases

BVQ for Dell EMC Unity finds answers to your typical use cases around that platform:

• What dependencies exist between my VMware or IBM PowerVM LPARs and my Unity FC/iSCSI Block storage LUNs (Workload? Capacity?)
• Are there bottlenecks in the internal data flow inside my Unity system (FC or Ethernet ports? Node cache or CPU? Data reduction layers?)
• When do I need to extent my capacity?
• How much capacity of my volumes are distributed on which tier of my pools?

Information gathering

BVQ scans topology and performance informations from the REST API of each Dell EMC Unity storage system.

What information is collected?

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• Scanned every 10 minutes (default) (10 minute interval averages)
  (that will be improved soon)
• 3 object types containing a total of ~30 performance statistics

Additional information:

• See Supported Dell EMC Unity systems (SW)  for more information about which HMC and Power Systems HW/SW versions are supported.
• See Getting started - Scanner for more Information about BVQ Scanner configuration.
• See Dell EMC Unity preparation for additional Cluster preparation tasks.
• See BVQ for Dell EMC Unity scan data BVQ Offline Scanner information for more details.

is much more intuitive to understand for a experienced platform expert. A BVQ Unified Model is much smaller, simpler and easier to understand for general management purposes. These are major benefits for BVQ in the market, compared to solutions, that desperately try to bring everything under the hat of a single general model.

Status "Experimental"

This is the firs version of the BVQ Unified Storage Platform. We are sure many new ideas will flow into that model soon. Due to that, we currently rate its status as "Experimental" to keep it open to be able to react to new ideas fast. Our objective is to add an additional unified model for SAN and to add more attributes an object types to the Unified Storage Model in near future.

Unified Model object relations

The BVQ Unified Storage Platform released with this BVQ version consists of nine general object types which are linked to specific object types of the following platform specific data models:

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Unified Model objekt linking

A BVQ Unified model object linking completely depends on the underlying specific object models. For example, if the NetApp model knows which NA Nodes are part of a NA Cluster, the BVQ Unified Storage model also knows which Storage Nodes are part of a Storage System.

BVQ Unified model use cases

• What dependencies exist between a generic block volume to Hypervisors as VMware or IBM Power VM (Workload? Capacity?)?
• How can I create a general report about Host mapped capacity without taking care of vendor specific data layouts.
• How can I create a general Splunk or Grafana Dashboard for all my store systems - vendor agnostic?

End to end inter platform relations

The BVQ Dell EMC Unity platform Unified Storage Platform model is interconnected to the following other platform models supported by BVQ. With that all Dell EMC Unity unified objects can be combined in an end to end relationship to objects of these platforms.

Object types

The following overview shows the elementary relationships of physical and logical objects:

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BVQ Unified Storage usage in BVQ

The object types of the BVQ Unified Storage Platform can be used as any other object types by all applications BVQ offers: Alerting, reporting, Grafana dashboards, REST interface and for sure in the Expert GUI App.

BVQ Expert GUI representation

All objects, attributes and statistics of this platform model can be interactively browsed within the BVQ Expert GUI as you are used to.

Where to find

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Unified Storage Platform objects?

Similar to all other objects, they show up in the Path browser inside the property panel of the BVQ Expert GUI.

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. Their attributes can also be chosen in the normal way, via the properties panel.

Object attributes

BVQ displays all interesting attributes provided. Please explore the BVQ Unity Table view favourites to get an impression of the most important attributes.

Performance and error statistics

The BVQ Dell EMC Unity module gathers Unified Storage Platform links to major important statistics delivered from the Unisphere API.

Typical questions around performance, load and utilization are answered by BVQ:

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underlying platforms.

To view performance statistics for one or multiple objects, simply select the objects and open the performance view. There you can choose the metrics you are interested in from the properties panel: