BVQ for Unified Storage Platform

Unified Storage Platform?

With this BVQ 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.

For BI reporting or ITSM connection purposes the data model of a platform does not need to be highly exact or in depth. Typically it doesn't matter from which vendor a volume comes from. Looking at a consuming host with the aspect of BI: A storage volume it's just a volume with some standard parameters and performance statistics, no matter from what vendor it comes from. Quite contrary to that, a platform specific model makes attachment of external BI or ITSM applications more complex than necessary.

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

All models coexist in BVQ. We still kept the specific models to be as excat 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.

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?

• Topology configuration information
  • Scanned every 1 hour (default)
  • 10 object types containing a total of ~325 attributes:
    Systems, Nodes, Pools, Tiers, SAN ports, Volumes, Hosts, ...
    
    
• Performance statistics
  • 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.

End to end inter platform relations

The BVQ Dell EMC Unity platform model is interconnected to the following other platform models supported by BVQ. With that all Dell EMC Unity 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:

BVQ Expert GUI representation

All objects, attributes and statistics of this platform can be interactively browsed within the BVQ Expert GUI.

Where to find Dell EMC Unity objects?

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

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 major important statistics delivered from the Unisphere API.

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

• Which LUNs or Pools are overloaded and show high latencies?
• Is there a congestion at an attached SAN port?
• Which LUNs put heavy load on my system?
• Does an latency peak have influence on the performance of a Pool?
• Is the FC host performance affected by slow drainers in the SAN?
• What Volume causes peak overloads in my Pool?

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: