BVQ for Unified Storage Platform

BVQ 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 the a unified data model with general object types that are linked to specific object types of our existing platform specific models. For example a Block Storage Volume of the BVQ Unified Storage Model is linked to a VDisk of the IBM Spectrum virtualize platform, a LUN of the NetApp ONTAP platform and a LUN of the Dell EMC Unity platform.  The same appears to attributes and performance statistics of general object types.

All models coexist in BVQ. The BVQ Unified Modela coexists in parallel to the platform specific models and we still kept the specific models to be as exact and near to the platform vendor models as possible. 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 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:

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

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 model can be interactively browsed within the BVQ Expert GUI as you are used to.

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

Performance and error statistics

The BVQ Unified Storage Platform links to major important statistics delivered from 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: