What is Storage Resource Monitoring?
What you need to know about various storage resource types, benefits, performance capabilities, and more.
What is Storage Resource Monitoring?
Storage Resource Monitoring Definition
Track the performance and capacity of your storage arrays with Storage Resource Monitoring (SRM) to keep tabs on any storage-related issues slowing your system down. SRM is compatible and works in tandem with multiple devices and vendors, offering real-time, unified visibility into each layer of the storage infrastructure.
Why do you need storage resource monitoring?
With the mass adoption of big data, virtualization, and the Internet of Things (IoT) taking over organizational processes, there’s a constant concern about finding a single storage platform meeting all the necessary criteria of scalability, reliability, and affordability. Storage is an essential element of every organization’s IT strategy and is why many experts emphasize the need for a proper storage management system and its comprehensive monitoring.
When companies look for an all-inclusive solution, they often settle for a multi-vendor approach. Although this strategy may be flexible and cost-effective, it can overwhelm users with administrative complexity. In such a case, it’s advisable to collect data from all the different storage platforms and centralize them into a single interface or management suite. More often, the storage software does a reasonably good job of producing reports on their individual operating conditions. However, they typically fail to give a holistic view of multiple storage devices or platforms. Additionally, when organizations use a single storage vendor for their IT functions, various products from the same vendor often may have different purposes and reporting patterns. Such a situation calls for a storage management/monitoring solution with the ability to collate the data from different reports to present combined data points.
A unified storage resource management system allows monitoring with a unified data storage interface. It’s designed to provide out-of-the-box, actionable intelligence by giving you the tools needed to troubleshoot performance issues quickly and accurately. A good storage resource monitoring system should also be able to pull metrics from across all storage arrays and every layer of your environment, from physical storage objects to VMs and other applications reliant on other specific devices, to give you a comprehensive and in-depth image of your network storage infrastructure environment.
What are the different types of data storage?
If you’re an IT professional, it’s your job to figure out what type of storage goes with what types of data use cases like mobile applications, databases, websites, files, or backing up mission-critical data. More often than not, you end up using two or more data storage types in combination to meet your organizational data storage needs.
For a beginner, getting a handle on the different data types and options can be overwhelming. Here are a few simplified types:
Direct Attached Storage (DAS) Resource
DAS is one of the more commonly known forms of storage. The hard drive in your laptop is a direct-attached storage device. In this case, it’s an obvious example as it’s literally directly attached to your machine. Still, DAS could also include an external hard drive or a thumb drive momentarily attached to a laptop or computer. DAS is usually an affordable alternative and easily accessible. However, sharing the data on it might be challenging as you would probably need to upload it to the cloud or send emails and carry it around to transfer data. This is why it’s not a practical option for business purposes.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) Resource
As the name suggests, NAS needs to have internet and LAN connectivity to ensure connectivity to the network and works with multiple hard drives configured into a RAID configuration attached to the NAS. RAID is a collection of independent hard drives set up to store replicated data. You can replicate the data fully or partially across all hard disks, and if one of the disks crashes, all the data is safe in another, so you never lose data. NAS is ideal for collaborative work as it offers centralized control of all files. However, due to scalability limitations, high activity levels on the network may slow down its performance and cause high latency.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
The shortcomings of a NAS are addressed by a Storage Area Network (SAN). A SAN leverages a high-speed network with block-level network access. It connects servers to their logical disk units (LUNs). These LUNs offer block provisioning from a shared storage pool, which is presented as a logical disk to the server. These blocks are then partitioned and formatted by the server to store the data on the LUN, like in local disk storage. This type of storage specializes in removing single points of failure. SANs are resilient and highly available storage resources designed to easily withstand multi-component or device failures. Because it’s a complex infrastructure of various storage elements, SAN addresses several storage resource availability limitations. It helps enhance application performance, increases storage utilization, consolidates storage resources, and provides tiered storage.
Object Storage Resource
Object Storage Resource is a relatively new storage resource, and it functions somewhat differently. It works with unstructured data objects instead of files or blocks. These data objects primarily comprise three parts: ID, metadata, and details like date of creation, permissions, etc. Usually, when file changes are made, it’s often stored as an entirely new version of the same file or object. Each version then becomes a completely different object or file. Object Storage Resource allows you to write once and read many times and lets you change an older version and save it as a new one, thereby deleting the previous version. However, if you make changes to the filename, it will allow you to save different versions of the same file. Object Storage Resource addresses the scalability issue entirely as it’s compatible with the cloud; it offers unlimited scalability. It also provides faster data retrieval and better recovery and is comparatively cost-effective. However, it may be a challenge to use with a traditional database and is suitable mainly for static data.
How to plan for your enterprise storage needs
Data storage and management are critical for business success, and each enterprise should choose a solution in line with its goals. For example, a small or medium-sized organization may achieve its business needs with a purely NAS-based approach. In contrast, enterprise-level organizations may need SAN storage solutions for their IT infrastructure to derive superior speed, scalability, and performance. Your enterprise storage resource monitoring tool should work with agentless NAS and SAN-attached storage monitoring and reporting and provide visualization of your storage environment, including volumes, RAID groups, storage pools, disks, and more.
What is Storage Resource Monitoring?
Storage Resource Monitoring Definition
Track the performance and capacity of your storage arrays with Storage Resource Monitoring (SRM) to keep tabs on any storage-related issues slowing your system down. SRM is compatible and works in tandem with multiple devices and vendors, offering real-time, unified visibility into each layer of the storage infrastructure.
Why do you need storage resource monitoring?
With the mass adoption of big data, virtualization, and the Internet of Things (IoT) taking over organizational processes, there’s a constant concern about finding a single storage platform meeting all the necessary criteria of scalability, reliability, and affordability. Storage is an essential element of every organization’s IT strategy and is why many experts emphasize the need for a proper storage management system and its comprehensive monitoring.
When companies look for an all-inclusive solution, they often settle for a multi-vendor approach. Although this strategy may be flexible and cost-effective, it can overwhelm users with administrative complexity. In such a case, it’s advisable to collect data from all the different storage platforms and centralize them into a single interface or management suite. More often, the storage software does a reasonably good job of producing reports on their individual operating conditions. However, they typically fail to give a holistic view of multiple storage devices or platforms. Additionally, when organizations use a single storage vendor for their IT functions, various products from the same vendor often may have different purposes and reporting patterns. Such a situation calls for a storage management/monitoring solution with the ability to collate the data from different reports to present combined data points.
A unified storage resource management system allows monitoring with a unified data storage interface. It’s designed to provide out-of-the-box, actionable intelligence by giving you the tools needed to troubleshoot performance issues quickly and accurately. A good storage resource monitoring system should also be able to pull metrics from across all storage arrays and every layer of your environment, from physical storage objects to VMs and other applications reliant on other specific devices, to give you a comprehensive and in-depth image of your network storage infrastructure environment.
What are the different types of data storage?
If you’re an IT professional, it’s your job to figure out what type of storage goes with what types of data use cases like mobile applications, databases, websites, files, or backing up mission-critical data. More often than not, you end up using two or more data storage types in combination to meet your organizational data storage needs.
For a beginner, getting a handle on the different data types and options can be overwhelming. Here are a few simplified types:
Direct Attached Storage (DAS) Resource
DAS is one of the more commonly known forms of storage. The hard drive in your laptop is a direct-attached storage device. In this case, it’s an obvious example as it’s literally directly attached to your machine. Still, DAS could also include an external hard drive or a thumb drive momentarily attached to a laptop or computer. DAS is usually an affordable alternative and easily accessible. However, sharing the data on it might be challenging as you would probably need to upload it to the cloud or send emails and carry it around to transfer data. This is why it’s not a practical option for business purposes.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) Resource
As the name suggests, NAS needs to have internet and LAN connectivity to ensure connectivity to the network and works with multiple hard drives configured into a RAID configuration attached to the NAS. RAID is a collection of independent hard drives set up to store replicated data. You can replicate the data fully or partially across all hard disks, and if one of the disks crashes, all the data is safe in another, so you never lose data. NAS is ideal for collaborative work as it offers centralized control of all files. However, due to scalability limitations, high activity levels on the network may slow down its performance and cause high latency.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
The shortcomings of a NAS are addressed by a Storage Area Network (SAN). A SAN leverages a high-speed network with block-level network access. It connects servers to their logical disk units (LUNs). These LUNs offer block provisioning from a shared storage pool, which is presented as a logical disk to the server. These blocks are then partitioned and formatted by the server to store the data on the LUN, like in local disk storage. This type of storage specializes in removing single points of failure. SANs are resilient and highly available storage resources designed to easily withstand multi-component or device failures. Because it’s a complex infrastructure of various storage elements, SAN addresses several storage resource availability limitations. It helps enhance application performance, increases storage utilization, consolidates storage resources, and provides tiered storage.
Object Storage Resource
Object Storage Resource is a relatively new storage resource, and it functions somewhat differently. It works with unstructured data objects instead of files or blocks. These data objects primarily comprise three parts: ID, metadata, and details like date of creation, permissions, etc. Usually, when file changes are made, it’s often stored as an entirely new version of the same file or object. Each version then becomes a completely different object or file. Object Storage Resource allows you to write once and read many times and lets you change an older version and save it as a new one, thereby deleting the previous version. However, if you make changes to the filename, it will allow you to save different versions of the same file. Object Storage Resource addresses the scalability issue entirely as it’s compatible with the cloud; it offers unlimited scalability. It also provides faster data retrieval and better recovery and is comparatively cost-effective. However, it may be a challenge to use with a traditional database and is suitable mainly for static data.
How to plan for your enterprise storage needs
Data storage and management are critical for business success, and each enterprise should choose a solution in line with its goals. For example, a small or medium-sized organization may achieve its business needs with a purely NAS-based approach. In contrast, enterprise-level organizations may need SAN storage solutions for their IT infrastructure to derive superior speed, scalability, and performance. Your enterprise storage resource monitoring tool should work with agentless NAS and SAN-attached storage monitoring and reporting and provide visualization of your storage environment, including volumes, RAID groups, storage pools, disks, and more.
Storage resource management and reporting for health, performance, and capacity of multi-vendor storage.
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