To make the most of your SAN (Storage Area Network), you need to deploy SRM (Storage Resource Management) in your business. This system will help you in identifying underutilized, unused, or outdated data and transferring it to inexpensive storage alternatives while also streamlining and predicting your storage needs for the future. Since storage management costs are going up, businesses are now looking for effective and automated solutions for Storage Resource Management.
Functions of SRM And Why Should You Use It?
Using Storage Resource Management will help you in managing your network expansions, storage media, events, policies, and configuration. This will improve your business's productivity because manual configurations take a lot of time and are also very hectic for network administrators. Following are some additional functions of Storage Resource Management:
- It helps you with efficient data backup.
- Provides you with performance analysis of your network.
- Helps you in monitoring your network.
- Gives you anti-virus protection.
- Helps you with user authentication.
- Allows you to create several storage units that you can access from one logical storage area with the help of Storage Virtualization.
- Provides you with maintenance and activity logs.
- Offer an accounting service for cost recovery called Billback.
Key Abilities of SRM And How You Can Use Them To Optimize Your Business
With the arrival of NAS and SAN storage networks, cloud services, Virtualization, and all-flash arrays, SRM has grown far beyond its initial basic management of HDD-based systems of storage. In today's time, SRM tools are managing software and applications that are deployed across public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise data centers spread out across the world. All these software environments now require an advanced model of Storage Resource Management that care more about the levels of costs and services and less about the actual physical storage. Following are some key abilities of SRM:
Business Accountability
This is a method used for calculating the expenditure of utilized applications in the organization or a business, that is commonly referred to as "showback" and "chargeback." your cost accounting will be accurate and efficient only if your costs are in line with the actual utilization of all your applications. NetApp's OnCommand Insight compare software and applications with virtual servers and/or hosts that are in use. This data can be used for comprehensive analysis of the usage of storage space by applications and tiers, and it can also be used to determine the cost and utilization by divisions, departments, and other organizational levels.
Cloud Storage Analysis
As businesses shift archival data and applications onto the private or off-premise cloud, it is the function of any SRM tool to allow visibility of all the software and applications transferred outside the in-house data centers.
Provides End-To-End Correlation
Business should be able to dynamically monitor, analyze, and map the entire pathway of data to minimize unscheduled maintenance, comply with agreements of storage level, and improve efficiency. When optimization is needed or in case of a bottleneck, service paths supply the information required to immediately perform analysis of the root cause, in spite of the location.
Enforcement of Global Policy
Storage Resource Management will not only help you in reducing your administrative overheads but will also assist you in establishing reliable services and help you reduce your resource wastage. These types of policies will help you avoid non-compliance, help you identify reclaimable resources, and provide a clear picture of your efficiencies.
Virtual Machines
As businesses move towards virtualization, it is becoming absolutely important to monitor VM (Virtual Machines) very closely. A good SRM tool will allow you to collect the following data about your VM:
- The utilization and allocation of VM capacity.
- VM's fabric support and underlying storage.
- Are VMs competing for mutual resources
- What are the data volumes accessed by each host?
- Which server is hosting which VM?
With all this information and much more, administrators will be able to compare and view data about backend storage, VMDK's, Hypervisors VM's, and data stores all in one go and in selected time. This information will talk about the data engineers to immediately remediate the performance of the VMs and make well-informed decisions about the appropriate placement of migrated and/or new VMs resources with sufficient headroom.
Data Collection Without an Agent
Historically agents used to be installed in every element or host in the storage environment to carry out resource data collection. However, it had one major drawback which was the maintenance and deployment of all these agents. In comparison, the recent SRM tools are "agentless." NetApp's OnCommand Insight, SRM tool, carry out commands throughout the network connection as compared to carrying it out inside the element or host, eliminating the need for an agent-based method and facilitating the nearly real-time collection of data.
How Can NetApp Training and Certification Help You Utilize All the Benefits Of SRM?
OnCommand insight is an amazing SRM tool that will help you in leveraging all the benefits mentioned above of SRM. To make the maximum use of this tool, you need to have a staff who have NetApp training and certification because not only will they learn about countless other things during NetApp training and certification such as ONTAP SAN implementation and ONTAP Cluster Administration, but they will also be able to utilize all the tools for the betterment of your business.
With the help of NetApp training, not only will your staff be up-to-date with the latest technological advancements, but they will also be in better position to incorporate all those advancements in your business helping you stay ahead of your competitors. Using Storage Resource Management is the best way to reduce your costs, increase utilization of wasted disk space, and staying in compliance with the global software standards.
Get in touch with one of our NetApp experts today, to learn more about our NetApp training modules.