Being a big trade union company with 2.1 million members, maintaining and organizing the members' data is a great challenge to them. To cater to this need, they have a SAN network that comprised of fabric switches, RAIDs, Tape Libraries, which are connected to ESX servers, Windows, Linux & Solaris hosts connected to this network through HBAs.
The primary challenge for the storage administrator is to monitor the multi-vendor storage devices in their SAN network, and to obtain high level of performance out of it. To achieve this, the administrator should ensure that the storage devices are up and running properly without any downtime. An efficient storage monitoring tool is the need of the hour.
"Monitoring all the devices and maintaining maximum uptime is the challenge faced by us. We were facing issues with the performance bottlenecks, which we need to identify and fix immediately", said Matthias Strege, Storage Administrator from Ver.di. |
Matthias and his team started looking for a multi-vendor storage monitoring solution which would resolve the issues they had. The solution should be easy-to-use and also affordable enough to suit their IT budget.
The team identified ManageEngine OpStor through a web search. They found that OpStor could drill down information till port, disk or LUN level and send email/SMS notifications to the storage administrators in case of any faulty conditions or performance degrade. The features like setting threshold limits for the performance counters caught their interest.
OpStor is also empowered with numerous useful reports which can be scheduled to be generated and sent to the administrator. They evaluated OpStor with the devices in their SAN network and found that the product has the potential to solve their storage monitoring problems. They went ahead implementing OpStor in their SAN environment.
"OpStor does a sterling work by notifying us whenever there are issues with the storage devices. This tool really helps us in identifying the problems and resolving them at an earlier stage. The problems are almost gone. We are happy with the way OpStor monitors the devices", says Matthias Strege. |
