1. Product Details

1.1. IBM Spectrum Control

IBM Spectrum Control is designed to provide the foundation for storage service level management by offering storage system and SAN performance and availability management. This includes connectivity reporting between file systems and physical disk as well as SAN and disk subsystem failure and audit logging.

Key features include:

• Enterprise-wide roll-up reports
• Asset & Capacity reporting,
• SAN Configuration guidance,
• End-to-End Topology views,
• Analytics, Trending, Forecasting,
• Problem isolation & Alerting,
• Provisioning, Replication management and Performance reporting.

IBM Spectrum Control components can be ordered as a bundled suite or ordered separately based on specific needs of the IT manager. The individual components include:

• IBM Spectrum Control Basic Edition
• IBM Spectrum Control for Data
• IBM Spectrum Control for Disk
• IBM Spectrum Control for Replication
• IBM Spectrum Control Standard Edition

1.2. IBM Spectrum Control Basic Edition

IBM Spectrum Control Basic Edition is focused on providing basic device management services for IBM System Storage DS3000, DS4000, DS5000, DS6000 & DS8000 products, IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), IBM System Storage N series (IBM N series) and heterogeneous storage environments.

Key features include:

• Discovery and configuration of supported devices
• Event gathering, error logging, and launch of device element managers
• Provisioning support, including LUN allocation and assignment
• Basic Asset and Capacity Reporting
• Discovery and asset management of IBM tape libraries
• A Topology viewer—End to End Storage Topology View and Health Console

1.3. IBM Spectrum Control for Data

IBM Spectrum Control for Data includes the same key features as Basic Edition. In addition, Spectrum Control for Data provides a wide range of enterprise reports, monitoring and alerts, policy-based action and file-system capacity automation in a heterogeneous environment. Spectrum Control for Data is designed to help improve capacity utilization of file systems and databases and add intelligence to data protection and retention practices.

Spectrum Control for Data provides a single interface to manage storage assets. It can help IT administrators identify, evaluate, control and predict storage usage. It also is designed to enable management of key aspects of the storage infrastructure: capacity, assets, events and availability.

Spectrum Control for Data offers active, policy-based management for an automated, self-healing approach to storage resource management.

Through monitoring, Spectrum Control for Data detects when a user-defined threshold has been reached, and extend the file system, to help prevent a potential outage. It is designed to enable IT administrators to define and enforce storage policies. It provides event management, which you can use to help fix or avoid storage outages.

Key features include:

• Comprehensive enterprise reporting, monitoring and alerts to help improve storage utilization and availability, and help you manage more with the same resources
• Capacity management and automated storage provisioning
• Monitor, report on and manage growing NAS resources with a universal view of direct-attached storage and NAS—from a file system or application perspective.
• Manage file systems, users, user groups, directories
• Manage Databases - DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase
• Manage storage for virtualized machines (VMware)
• Data Categorization (aged files, orphan files, file by file type)
• File system analysis - file name, file type, file size, date attributes, last accessed & last modified
• Data classification and migration using TSM automation features
• Space Optimization features
• File system grouping
• Quota management

1.4. IBM Spectrum Control for Disk

IBM Spectrum Control for Disk includes the same key features as Spectrum Control Basic Edition. In addition, Spectrum Control for Disk offers device management, configuration and disk performance management. Spectrum Control for Disk is designed to enable device configuration and management of SAN-attached devices from a single console. It offers performance management capabilities, including thresholds and gauges, that allows proactive management of storage performance. It is designed to allow a user to gather and analyze historical and real-time performance metrics for IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), DS8000, DS6000, DS5000, DS4000, XIV, SVC and IBM N series.

Key features include:

• Proactive performance management by providing an IT administrator with a single, integrated console for the performance management of IBM System Storage devices.
• Monitor performance metrics across multiple storage subsystems from a single console.
• Allow administrators to monitor metrics, such as I/O rates and cache utilization, and support optimization of storage through the identification of the best LUNs across multiple storage subsystems.
• Monitor and analyze performance statistics for storage systems to measure services levels by storing received performance statistics into database tables for later use, and analyze and generate reports on monitored devices for display in central administrative console.
• Generate alerts to enable proactive event-based actions to reduce potential outages.
• Provides a Performance Optimization Engine that can help reduce service times of resource-constrained application by an aver-age of 48% and up to a maximum of 90% using a heat map that pro-vides storage IO utilization reports that can be used to determine hotspots in the environment and generate recommendation plans for migration to distribute workload.
• Virtual storage (SVC) performance management
• Performance table and graphical reports
• Storage controller performance
• Storage system I/O group performance
• Storage system are ready performance
• Storage system managed disk group performance
• Storage system performance threshold alerts
• Storage system volume performance

1.5. IBM Spectrum Control for Replication

IBM Spectrum Control for Replication includes the same key features as Spectrum Control Basic Edition. In addition, Spectrum Control for Replication is designed to help simplify copy services management for IBM System Storage DS6000, DS8000, SVC and IBM ESS.

Spectrum Control for Replication is designed to control and monitor copy services operations in storage environments. It also provides advanced copy services functions for supported storage subsystems on the SAN.

Key features include:

• Provide configuration and management of the IBM copy services like FlashCopy, synchronous Metro Mirror and asynchronous Global Mirror capabilities.
• Keep data on multiple related volumes consistent across storage subsystems
• Perform freeze-and-go functions with consistency on multiple pairs when an error occurs during a replication operation
• Take advantage of configuration assistance and automate the source-to-target pairing setup, as well as monitoring and tracking the replication operations
• Automate the mapping of source volumes to target volumes, allowing a group of source volumes to be automatically mapped to a pool of target volumes.

1.6. IBM Spectrum Control Standard Edition

IBM Spectrum Control Standard Edition is a bundled offering at a reduced price that combines the benefits of:

• IBM Spectrum Control Basic Edition
• IBM Spectrum Control for Data
• IBM Spectrum Control for Disk

In addition to the benefits and features of Data, Disk and Basic Edition, Spectrum Control Standard Edition offers additional management, control and performance reporting for the fibre channel SAN infrastructure. These features include the following benefits:

• Provide automated device discovery, topology rendering, error detection and fault isolation, SAN error predictor, zone control, real-time monitoring and alerts, performance reporting and event management for heterogeneous enterprise SAN environments.
• Help simplify the management and improve the availability of the SAN environment.
• Provide automatic device discovery and allow multiple SAN views, including physical, logical and zone views.
• View and analyze multiple aspects of the storage environment, including capacity, utilization, assets and availability.

2. Terminology

• Storage Area Network (SAN)
• Storage Resource Management (SRM)
• Heterogeneous
• Replication
• Business Continuity
• FlashCopy
• Metro Mirror
• Global Mirror

3. Architecture

The IBM Spectrum Control consists of several key components.

3.1. Data server

This component is the control point for product scheduling functions, configuration, event information, reporting, and graphical user interface (GUI) support. It coordinates communication with and data collection from agents that scan file systems and databases to gather storage demographics and populate the database with results. Automated actions can be defined to perform file system extension, data deletion, and Spectrum Control backup or archiving, or event reporting when defined thresholds are encountered. The Data server is the primary contact point for GUI user interface functions. It also includes functions that schedule data collection and discovery for the Device server.

3.2. Device server

This component discovers, gathers information from, analyzes performance of, and controls storage subsystems and SAN fabrics. It coordinates communication with and data collection from agents that scan SAN fabrics and storage devices.

3.3. Database

A single database instance serves as the repository for all Spectrum Control components.

3.4. Agents

Data agents, Storage Resource agents, and fabric agents gather host, application, and SAN fabric information and send this information to the Data Server or Device server.

3.5. GUI

The graphical user interface (GUI) lets you enter or receive information for all Spectrum Control components.

3.6. CLI

The command-line interface (CLI) lets you issue commands for major Spectrum Control functions.

3.7. Tivoli Integrated Portal

The IBM Spectrum Control installation program includes IBM Tivoli Integrated Portal. Tivoli Integrated Portal is a standards-based architecture for Web administration. Tivoli Integrated Portal enables developers to build administrative interfaces for IBM and independent software products as individual plug-ins to a common console network. The installation of Tivoli Integrated Portal is required to enable single sign-on for Spectrum Control. Single sign-on is an authentication process that enables you to enter one user ID and password to access multiple applications. Single sign-on integrates with the launch in context feature to enable you to move smoothly from one application to a functionally related location in a second application

4. Integration

• Storage Management Initiative - Specification (SMI-S)
• BIRT Project
• Search engine results page (SERP)
• Application Programming Interface APIs

5. Interoperability

IBM Spectrum Control supports:

5.1. Storage Systems

• EMC
• Fujitsu
• Hewlett-Packard
• Hitachi Data Systems
• IBM
• LSI
• NEC
• NetApp
• Silicon Graphics
• Sun Microsystems

5.2. Operating Systems

• AIX
• HP-UX
• Red Hat Linux
• SUSE Linux
• Microsoft Windows
• Solaris

5.3. Host Bus Adapters (HBA)

• Brocade
• Emulex
• Hewlett-Packard
• IBM
• LSI
• QLogic

5.4. Switches and Directors

• Brocade
• Cisco
• QLogic

6. Translation

Spectrum Control is available in the following languages:

• Czech
• English
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Russian
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese

7. Announcement Letters

• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center V2.1
• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center V3.1
• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication V3.1
• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center V3.2
• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center V3.3
• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication V3.3
• IBM Spectrum Control V4.1

The content is sourced from: https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:IBM_Spectrum_Control