This post is superseded by STORAGE MANAGER - WHAT WE ARE WORKING ON - Updated on Apr 22, 2015. Please follow the new link for updates.
Looking forward to some of these features..
5.6 released. What is 5.7?
5.3 the latest version was released
Hi Pedrama,
5.6.2 was released yesterday. You should be receiving a customer notification with more details within the next week.
Will STM 5.7 support NetApp 8.1+ Cluster Mode? If not, has this been considered for the STM development pipeline?
Hi dalelsw,
We are looking very closely at NetApp Cluster Mode although it is undecided at this time when it will be included in Storage Manager.
I see that some collector poll intervals are being raised (eg: SMI-S and VMware).
One of the issues we have with the SMI-S collector is that the 15 minute interval is already too big. If we are using STM to alert on performance spikes, we would ideally like it to be 5 minutes or even lower.
Also, is there a reason for raising the interval?
Hi dale,
I detail the reasons in this Product Blog post: Storage Manager 5.7 Beta 1. This should not affect upgrades, only fresh installs, so you should not see any change on your end unless you do a fresh install. Even for new users, they can still set finer grained collection settings through the product's SMI-S and VMware policies. VMware performance polling can be set at 5 minute intervals. The 15 minute SMI-S performance polling interval is not changing in 5.7. Furthermore, the 15 minute restriction is a limitation placed on us by the SMI-S standard and the vendors.
The short version of why this change is being made is that evaluations are usually done on undersized hardware and without deploying proxy agents for scalability. This change is made to ease evals for new customers so they can see the data they need without first learning how to scale Storage Manager.
I see that the SMI-S specification is limited to a minimum period of 15 minutes. However, it would be good if there were a method via the STM GUI to specify lower values.
It is possible to unofficially do this by editing ".../agent/systemic/mod.sys.smis.Smis_1.0/mod.sys.smis.Smis.xml" on the agent performing the monitoring, via the following entry for each item: "<perfFreqInSecs>300</perfFreqInSecs>".
However, this is reset when the agent is updated via STM. Therefore it would be good if the GUI could store the custom values, so that they are also pushed out when other changes are pushed to agents.
I previously raised this with the support team and the response was:
"At this stage, we do not have anything printed in our Admin Guide as 15 minutes is the supported method. However, we have requested it be placed on the roadmap for the next feature release."
HI Dale,
I do want to point out that even if we poll the provider more often than every 15 minutes, it is only updating its information from the array every 15 minutes. Effectively, by changing this agent setting, you are just increasing the agent checking for new info more often, which results in a NO_OP.
This is also a big push for us, we have moved many of our heads to CMode and need this support in Storage Manager. Is there any other method to manage or monitor these storage heads without CMode support? At this point we have decided not to renew, but I'm sure management would keep interest if Cmode support was on the roadmap and even better if you have a time frame. At this point, it leaves our cMode out of this monitoring system, which isn't good.
Any feedback will be helpful. Thanks.
Hi alexander937,
Cluster-mode support is definitely on the roadmap, but unfortunately I can't give you any timeframes for support. I promise you, we are hearing feedback from many NetApp customers that echoes your own.
Any word on VNXe support as yet?
Hi squinsey,
I've contacted you offline regarding VNXe support. We are looking at feasibility right now; EMC's lack of SMI-S support for this array family makes support of this array technically challenging and expensive to implement. It is on our radar and we are investigating options though.
Hi alexander937 and dalelsw,
NetApp Cluster-Mode support has now been added to the WWWO. Cheers!
Thank you for this information.
what kind of scale ability will 5.7 have... i know the one we have now has very bad scale ability.
EMC Isilon is supported in STM back v5.3 i think. Still it doesn't support block level iSCSI feature for Isilon. Same iSCSI feature is supported for Dell Equallogic in STM. What are the plans for Isilon block storage monitorning?
Hi kaushikpathak,
The iSCSI block features are not exposed by EMC through SNMP and therefore we cannot collect this information. I discussed this with the EMC Isilon Team. According to them, iSCSI block support on Isilon is a legacy feature that they will eventually EOL and thus there are no plans to promote it through any sort of management interface in the future.
I'm a new user of STM and am VERY interested in the NetAPP ONTAP 8.x C-Mode support. I have a C-Mode system in-house and have a customer coming online with 2 new clusters. The sooner the better! I would be happy to try out any pre-release versions you have to help you get this to market sooner.
Thanks very much, rupdegraff. When we post for Beta & RC's, please sign up. We always appreciate feedback.
Hi
I am lost.
is SRM the replacement of STM ?
when I go to my customer portal download, I have to different download. but after upgrading my STM to 6.0.2 and clic on thwack storrage community I jumped straght to SRM forums/blogs.
thanks
Hi Gildas Declerq,
Effectively, SRM is STM - think of it as a rebranding. We are working on changing the name of the forum on Thwack to help avoid this confusion, but SRM/STM will cohabitate the same space nonetheless.
Do you support vnxe?
Hi laverne97,
We'd love to support VNXe; however, after recent intense investigation we've determined that there is no way to pull performance data from these devices. I'd be very interested to know if there is still interest from customers in seeing VNXe supported, but only providing capacity and configuration data? Due to our restrictions of licensing, it would still cost the same from a licensing "per disk" perspective, so I'm curious if the value is there for your VNXe use cases with a limited set of data.
Also, do you have the old VNXe device or the newer VNX2e device? If you're not sure, the exact model number would be sufficient (e.g. 3150).
what is new release version
Every place I've worked recently has a HP LeftHand P4xxx (P4300, P4530, etc) still in use, even if they are actively transitioning off to something else, they are keeping it around for development. If you're taking requests, I'd love to see the HP LeftHand P4xxx in the next release or release candidate.
Hi Ramon,
Thanks for the insight! SRM supports HP Lefthand devices today via the SRM Profiler module. We are very interested in adding Lefthand support to the SRM Orion module as well, but there are no timeframes I can provide at the moment.
Hi Sunil,
SRM/STM 6.1 was released on May 19th, 2015. It should be available in your customer portal if you are on active maintenance. Enjoy!
How is the Nimble integration coming along ?
Thanks !!
dave
I second this. Having HP LeftHand P4xxx support in the SRM Orion Module would be great.
