By Susan Twombly, July 2006
When you think about having a big picture view into your IT infrastructure, do you see a whiteboard? If so, you're not alone. You may be surprised at how many companies resort to using a marker and eraser as infrastructure management tools when their management software doesn't quite make the mark on its own.
That's because many of today's management tools are too narrowly focused, forcing you to cram your IT toolbox with separate tools to monitor and control storage and servers — increasing complexity and sending you back to the drawing board once again.
What's needed is a way to integrate server and storage management into one tool that simplifies management across the entire IT environment.
That's where HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) comes in and the HP Essentials suite of plug-ins — the first solution in the industry to unify management for servers and storage.
Bundled with all HP storage and server systems, SIM provides the basics for unified management. Then, the tightly integrated Essentials suite adds capabilities that can elevate server and storage management to higher levels of efficiency, agility and cost control. Now you can have one unified tool for a whole new level of visibility across your heterogeneous IT infrastructure — and a whole new use for your whiteboard.
Given the explosive growth in storage networks in recent years and the resulting complexity, storage network management can realize some of the greatest benefits of unified infrastructure management.
As a key Essentials plug-in, the award-winning HP Storage Essentials Suite integrates with SIM to deliver advanced storage management capabilities, including SAN management, storage resource management, provisioning, back up reporting and application infrastructure monitoring. HP SIM and Storage Essentials utilize a common discovery engine, reporting engine, data repository, policy engine and role-based security model to manage heterogeneous storage networks and servers from a single interface.
Storage Essentials also ties into HP OpenView software for integrated IT services management capabilities in areas like provisioning, operations, reporting and charge back.
What results is a tightly integrated solution for unified infrastructure management that bridges the islands of server, storage and IT service management.
And because it's based on the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), driven by the Storage Networking Industry Association, Storage Essentials makes it easier to deploy and manage today's heterogeneous storage networks and protect your investments while doing so.
Like other areas of infrastructure management, the storage management toolbox is often overcrowded with multiple tools for storage resource management — each delivering their own set of details that only cloud the "big picture" view administrators need.
As your central management console, Storage Essentials simplifies management with a consolidated, single-pane-of-glass view across the server and storage network — allowing administrators to better understand, control, plan and manage storage resources.
Storage Essentials automatically discovers and maps direct-attached and network-attached storage and backup topology. With a graphical display of devices, the physical connections between those devices, as well as redundant connections, you can begin to find the answers to questions that are key to simplifying storage management:
"What's really in my storage infrastructure?"
"Where do I need more capacity?"
"What's the root cause of my performance problems?"
Armed with a complete storage inventory, you can begin to proactively monitor and control storage resources in real time to prevent capacity shortages, optimize existing resources and simplify planning. Automatic capacity threshold warnings enable you to identify potential capacity bottlenecks before they impact availability levels. If performance problems occur, you can isolate and remedy them more quickly to keep service levels high.
With a unified tool for storage management, it's no longer necessary to buy multiple management tools or to provide specialized training for IT staff on each tool, reducing both capital and operational costs.
Historical usage trends provided by Storage Essentials can enable you to reallocate underutilized assets to get the most from your storage investments to manage a growing infrastructure with existing resources.
You can leverage usage data to forecast future demands and plan for capacity growth well in advance to help provide business continuity, protect data and keep IT aligned with changing business needs. Just-in-time storage purchasing helps ensure you have new storage assets on hand when needed — not lying around unused — helping to reduce your total cost of ownership.
You can also have the freedom to buy the storage hardware you need to meet both your business and budget needs, knowing that Storage Essentials is based on open standards to manage a multivendor storage environment.
Device management was once considered cutting-edge. Now, with unified infrastructure management, you can begin to move from islands of management to consolidated management of server and storage resources for greater IT efficiency — freeing IT staff to help the business leverage the strategic information within.
It's where the future of storage is heading. Now, with unified infrastructure management from HP, you can come along.
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