The storage industry is composed of a substantial number of vendors who provide both storage hardware, including disks, subsystems, and SAN devices, and storage software to facilitate hardware management, operations, data movement, device migration, automation and recovery operations. Customers typically face a number of differing vendors management products. The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC) is an open storage infrastructure management solution designed to help reduce the effort of managing complex, heterogeneous storage infrastructures, to help improve storage capacity utilization, and to help improve administrative efficiency. TPC provides reporting capabilities, identifying your data usage and its location, and provisioning. It also provides a central point of control to move the data based on business needs to more appropriate online or offline storage. These key capabilities support Information On Demand, enabling you to easily manage the data through its lifecycle.
Our vision is to develop an integrated storage network analytics and performance management tools to aid policy-based autonomic resource provisioning of storage networks. These technologies will help system administrators to seamlessly manage the various aspects of storage networking: monitoring, performance, planning and provisioning in heterogeneous storage environments. The focus in research is provide advanced functions such as self-diagnosis, error prediction, configuration checker, policy based storage management, SAN Configuration and Planning, Application migration, disaster recovery planning.
CIM Client
The SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) standard is a significant and relatively recent evolution in storage management. SMI-S enables centralized management of distributed storage assets, and is the foundation for our Total Storage Productivity Center (TPC) product. The SMI-S standard is implemented using the CIM (Common Information Model) DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) industry-standard management architecture. A CIM Client is a client that issues CIM Operation Requests, CIM Message Requests and receives and processes CIM Operation Responses. The CIM Client was open-sourced through the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability (SBLIM) project within the Linux Technology Center.
APERI
Vendor-neutral, open, storage management framework designed to cultivate both an open-source community and an ecosystem for complementary products, capabilities, and services around the framework to promote greater consumer choice and foster competition.
* Provide an open, extensible, standards-based storage management framework* Give customers more flexibility and choice on how to manage their storage
* Simplify the infrastructure customers need to manage storage
TPC Topology Viewer
Here are a few screenshots just to show what the topology viewer looks like, so people don't have to watch the videos to get a rough idea... The general idea is there are 4 levels of semantic zooming. The first level shows "everything", the next level (L0) shows "groups of one kind of thing", the next shows one such group and the last (L2) shows one "thing". Each view is designed to best represent the kind of information you need at this point. Therefore a view showing several groups is totally different from a view showing one thing. The underlying idea is that you would not use the same tool for every kind of nail or screw you have in your toolbox. You have screwdrivers for tools (and there are flat heads and philips) and there are hammers each of these come in different sizes. Similarly, the idea of the zoom levels and different views in the topology is to provide a representation that is most appropriate for each situation instead of having one large hammer that's used for everything. Therefore, in addition to the zoom levels, views are specialized by their content: A L1:Fabric view is very different from a L1:Computers view is different from a L2:Subsystem view, because each of these need to show very different kinds of information. You can find some more information about these concepts in the CHI experience report paper linked at the top of this page and in the videos.
Below: The top level view shows an aggregated view of the whole environment. In each group items can be "pinned" to make them visible at the top level for monitoring.
Drilling into "Computers" shows groups of computers. Groups can be expanded and collapsed in place. Status of items is aggregated for the group. Users can regroup items by various criteria.
Drilling into one a group of computers. This is a very different view because it focuses on connectivity and it shows groups of volumes reachable for that computer, in this case, and what switches the computer is connected to. By drilling into individual items or groups the user can navigate to other views, such as a L2:Switch view etc.
This screenshot also shows the tabular view of the topology (it's always there but we just don't show it in the other screenshots to keep the images smaller). The tabular and graphical views are always synchronized so you can work in both, because -- surprise -- each of them has its advantages for certain kinds of tasks. Again, the idea is to provide users with a tool that is most appropriate for a specific task and situation. A side benefit is that through the tabular view the topology is accessible for non-sighted users.
Drilling into ONE computer. This view shows even more details, for instance a HBA (Host Bus Adapter) and its ports. This allows users to see what port a switch is connected to, for instance. Connections are shown on demand by selecting items. Nothing is selected in this screenshot, therefore no connections are shown.
By comparison, a L1:Fabric view looks very different from all of the above. Again - the idea is to provide a view that is most appropriate to show the information you need at a specific semantic zoom level and depending on what kind of item you are focusing on (computers, connectivity, storage, etc)
