The main scope of Storage Manager (further on referenced as StorMan) is information, monitoring, virtualization and dynamic management of storage resources:
A uniform management service for storage management, information and monitoring is provided by StorMan.
StorMan provides a common virtualization layer offering:
Integrated Storage Management for
SE Manager on BS2000 SE servers
Common and stable interfaces for
Integration in BS2000 (SHC-OSD)
stand-alone usage
Integration with server management software such as ServerView Operations Manager, openSM2, etc
Management options for
Automation with prescheduled or event-triggered scripts based on StorMan's CLIs
Encapsulation of the backend complexity of
Storage-vendor-specific interfaces (Fujitsu)
The following figure provides an overview of the architectural layers:
Figure 1: Overview
The base technology of StorMan is SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification), the standard defined and supported by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) for storage management. However, additional to SMI-S vendor-specific APIs are used for integration.
The functionality of StorMan covers the main functions for:
Managing and administrating storage resources (storage volumes and pools)
Replication service: local replication (based on snap and/or clone technology) and remote replication
Storage cluster support
Additionally, StorMan provides the functionality required for information and monitoring of storage arrays, namely:
Discovery
Information about logical and physical components
Status monitoring
Statistical and performance metrics