HP Storage Essentials: Topology - Overview & Features

Overview

The system explorer capabilities of Storage Essentials offers an intuitive and visually appealing pictorial view of your storage topology. Applications, host servers, fabric switches, and storage systems are graphically mapped, along with their connections and interdependencies. The Web browser interface offers a wide array of tools for navigating and arranging your topology, determining the impact of SAN changes on your business applications, drilling down to device-specific details, and configuring your SAN.

The fabric explorer capabilities provides a familiar tree view that enables you to view and navigate multiple fabrics and their members. As you select the resources that make up each fabric and the zones, zone sets, host bindings, and storage system LUNs that provide access to storage services, Storage Essentials lights up member resources and their connections in the topology for fast, easy visualization.

The Fabric Explorer provides tree-based navigation of fabrics, zones, zone sets, host bindings, LUNs, and paths, while the System Explorer graphically depicts all resources, illuminates selected fabric elements, and provides context-sensitive drill down and configuration

Features

Topology

• Display the "system-wide" storage topology - including applications, hosts, switches, storage systems and their connections - in a single Web-based view
• Create new views with port level connections for host HBAs, fabric switches, and storage systems with the Show Port Details feature

Path and dependency management

• Display paths and dependencies between all resources, including multipath connections
• Illuminate all resources that would be impacted if a selected device becomes unavailable with the Show Impact feature

Flexible topology visualization and navigation tools

• Zoom in or zoom out with the Scaling feature to visualize your entire SAN or individual elements within your SAN
• Use the Panning Window to rapidly navigate large storage networks, and zoom in on areas of interest
• Arrange individual resources or groups of resources in the topology to create custom layouts using Drag-and-Drop
• Save new layouts for future reference with the Save View feature
• Focus on just the fabrics you want to manage using the Filter Fabrics feature

Fabric Management

• Use a hierarchical tree to explore all fabrics and fabric members
• Select a fabric or the individual resources in the fabric to automatically highlight the resources in the topology
• Visualize the three primary constraining entities for any SAN - Zone Entries, Host Bindings, Storage System LUN
• Expand Zone Entries to view all zones, zones sets, and zone aliases in a fabric
   
  • Select any Zone Entry to highlight the resources that make up each entry in the topology
  • Activate, deactivate, create, modify, or delete zones and zone sets directly from the Fabric Explorer (requires Storage Essentials Provisioning plug-in)
• Expand Host Bindings to view all HBAs and HBA ports for every host server
   
  • Select any host server to highlight the host in the topology
  • Select an HBA port to automatically highlight the connection from the host to the storage system
  • Assign hosts bindings directly from the Fabric Explorer (requires Storage Essentials Provisioning plug-in)
• Expand Storage System LUN Access to view all LUNs and FC ports for each storage system
   
  • Select a port to highlight in the topology the host servers that are connected to that port
  • View every LUN that is mapped through each port, including LUN number, volume, and volume size
  • Select a LUN to highlight in the topology the host servers that are connected to storage volumes through that LUN
  • Select and concatenate volumes and create and map LUNs directly from the Fabric Explorer (requires Storage Essentials Provisioning plug-in)

Resource drill down

• Double click on any resource to drill down to that resource's detailed navigation page
• Resource is modeled in CIM schema for standards-based, normalized management

Context-sensitive pop-up menu

• Pop-up menus display the options available for the selected resource, including:
   
  • Show events related to the resource
  • Show policies related to the resource
  • Update the resource's data by conducting a single element scan
  • Show impact of the resource on the rest of the SAN
  • Show port details for the resource
  • Provision the resource
  • Delete resource
  • Run a custom command
  • Launch an external tool, such as the device manager for the selected resource

Event detection

• Highlight all resources in the topology that have a new unread event using the Event feature
• Filter which resources are highlighted based on whether the event is Informational, Warning, or Critical using the Severity filter