Storage Resource Management (SRM) encompasses several distinct
but interrelated areas:
Asset Management - The ability to discover, identify, and track available
storage resources such as disks, file systems, and network shares. In addition
to these, SRM adds the ability to track application-specific resource types
such as Exchange Mailbox and Public Folder Stores.
Capacity Management and Planning - The ability to locate, monitor,
and analyze the usage and availability of storage resources over time. SRM provides
numerous customizable reports which illustrate the current and historical usage
patterns of file systems and application-specific resources, thus helping administrators
plan for future growth in storage demand by analyzing historical trends. Administrators
can also identify wasted and unallocated space to optimize the utilization of
present resources.
Provisioning - Defining and acting on allocation policies for available
storage capacity and bandwidth. SRM provides the tools to monitor the availability
and usage of storage continuously and to automatically invoke external applications
(e.g. a Logical Volume Manager) according to user-defined rules.
To better understand how the components of SRM interact, think of the SRM reporting
process as a pipeline:
Data Collection - The agent gathers statistics about the local
storage resources and transmits them to the SRM Server, where they are placed in the
Repository. The exact types of data collected are determined by a template that
may be configured for each agent. Because some statistics require more expensive
processing on the client host, Analysis level data collection templates may
be run during off-peak hours while Discovery level templates are run periodically
throughout the day.
Report Generation (or Analysis) - The Report Engine extracts relevant
statistics from the Repository tables, applies suitable analysis (e.g. trending),
and produces a report. As a post-processing step, the Report Engine checks for
any Notifications set for the report, and invokes the configured handlers if the
notification
conditions are met. The report itself is then made available for viewing.
Presentation - The Console retrieves the report and displays it in
a web browser, where custom filters may be applied to the data and a variety
of charts and graphs can be generated. Reports can be exported in a variety
of formats, or you can even generate a document-quality report combining the
tabular data and selected charts in PDF format.
Note that data collection and Report Generation jobs are scheduled independently,
at different times and intervals. Thus, the administrator may collect statistics
nightly, or even hourly, but generate reports only once per week if desired. The
Presentation phase happens on demand, when the user opens a previously generated
report from the Console.
The SRM Server provides a centralized data repository of information
gathered by the SRM Agents, and a set of administrative functions including
Job Control, Event Management, and User Management. The SRM Server generates
the necessary reports from the data stored in the centralized data
repository.
SRM Agents are software modules that perform data collection operations for specific
operating systems or applications. The SRM system provides a variety of agents,
each designed to handle a different kind of data. See
Agents.
CommCell Console provides administrators with an interface
to administer and generate reports on the SRM system. The Console may be installed
as a standalone application on the administrator's workstation, or as a remotely
accessible applet from the SRM server. (IIS is needed on the SRM Server computer,
to display the CommCell Console as a Java Applet.) See
CommCell Console
for more information.
SRM may be deployed in a typical enterprise environment, where the SRM Server
and all client hosts are interconnected via a TCP/IP network as illustrated
below.
Summaries provide vital information at a glance for entities in the SRM
system. The summaries appear in the console's main window when an entity is
highlighted in the Resource Browser to the left of the main window.
SRM Reports provide detailed information about the resources of SRM Client
computers, with each report tailored to a particular aspect of resource management. Information
is presented in a logically grouped, tabular format and can be viewed in a web browser, easily
filtered, printed, and exported to a variety of formats. Where useful,
information is also presented in a variety of chart formats. In addition, custom
reports can be created with standard Microsoft tools, such as Visual Studio. For
more information, see SRM Reports.
To better understand how the components of SRM interact, think of the SRM reporting
process as a pipeline: