Enhanced Data Center Visibility with Dell EMC Storage Resource Manager

Over the years, as data center complexity has increased to support the volume, variety, velocity and veracity of data in the enterprise, organizations often find it challenging to get a clear understanding of how infrastructure is performing. Visibility into data center performance is important to understand how resources are used and it provides an opportunity to improve capacity and resource planning. This enables storage admins to address growing business requirements with agility.

Storage admins who love the data center visibility that they get with Dell EMC Storage Resource Manager (SRM) will be delighted to know that we are taking SRM further forward with our latest release – SRM 4.4.

What is SRM?

SRM is our on-premises storage monitoring and reporting tool that works with Dell EMC storage and supports many third-party data center products. With SRM, storage admins can monitor applications, servers, SAN and storage from a single pane of glass, enabling an enterprise wide view of their entire data center environment. SRM provides information on capacity planning, performance troubleshooting, workload placement, configuration compliance, charge-back, proactive alerting and newly simplified custom reporting. With the release of version 4.4, SRM now includes some exciting and innovative enhancements that make it easier to find and solve problems providing even more comprehensive support across your entire data center.

Enhanced Troubleshooting and Alerting

SRM’s Event Correlation feature helps identify the root cause of a performance issue by looking at related health/configuration events in the context of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). With SRM’s improved Performance Analysis Dashboard you can easily identify overloaded shared components and see details on bully consumers and impacted victims from the details of connected hosts.  This will help to address the ‘noisy neighbors’ kind of scenarios. In addition to providing alerts for congestion issues and associated recommendations, the SRM SAN congestion troubleshooting feature is now enhanced to provide a report detailing ports affected with the slow drain condition.

Even More Comprehensive Third-Party Support

SRM 4.4 now supports VMware vSAN which is a foundational component of VMware Cloud Foundation and it’s the storage component of VxRail and vSAN Ready Nodes. SRM Reports on vSAN enabled cluster resources, host systems and datastore objects. In addition, SRM monitors vSAN problems for health, capacity, configuration and performance. As a comprehensive reporting tool, SRM 4.4 has extended support of third-party storage arrays for discovery and monitoring with reports on inventory, capacity and performance metrics.

New Cost-Savings Dashboard

SRM can help you optimize resource utilization by identifying cost-savings opportunities in the storage infrastructure from VMs powered offs to LUNs with no IOPS, including non-utilized switch ports and many other opportunities.

SRM Potential Savings Dashboard

New Simplified Customizable Reporting

SRM now provides an easy-to-use wizard to build custom reports. The wizard provides:

  • Easy to understand storage model by exposing data through Virtual Tables
  • Less time in building custom reports by using metrics with pre-defined settings
  • Simplified workflows with drag-and-drop operations

In addition, SRM 4.4 provides numerous other enhancements ranging from SRM REST APIs for changing device passwords to platform specific enhancements, and supports the latest platform versions. Check out Dell EMC Storage Resource Manager to learn more.

About the Author: Magi Kapoor

Magi Kapoor is a seasoned product management leader and is driving Dell Technologies Multicloud SaaS strategy. She has 20 years of experience in the storage industry with responsibilities spanning product management, systems engineering, technical marketing, business strategy, and product development. Magi has a track record of successfully launching and managing full lifecycle of multiple enterprise storage products and cloud offerings. Magi holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University, and an MBA from Babson College. Connect with Magi on twitter @Magi_Kapoor.