IBM Spectrum Control - From the office of a veteran user
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I have been using the IBM Spectrum Control since many years now when it was branded as Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. We use to manage the DS8000 systems using this product with very limited options. IBM has come a long way forward after rebranding the product as IBM Spectrum Control and have managed to provide us with the centralized management and monitoring of all of our storage systems as well as even from various vendors. There are certain limitations as we can use spectrum control to manage and monitor the block storage only. Files storage is not yet supported. Similarly, non IBM equipment has certain limitations as well when it comes to the monitoring and performance statistics. We have few DS8000s, v7000, FS 7200s, FS 900s along with few SVC clusters as well as the Unity and VNXs being configured on spectrum control. Hosts includes various clusters of ESXi, RHEL and IBM AIX.
Pros
- Managing of block storage
- Standard and customized advanced reporting
- Performance monitoring of the IBM block storage
- Monitoring and Performance of the vSphere cluster
Cons
- Must extend the management and monitoring to File storage.
- Performance monitoring of non IBM equipment may also be added.
Most Important Features
- Integrated monitoring and Analysis
- Consolidated management of heterogeneous storage
- Capacity planning and load balancing
Return on Investment
- The high licensing cost if offset buy the capacity savings and the accuracy of the analytics.
- It has a positive impact on our ROI and as improved it almost 9%.
Other Software Used
IBM Spectrum Virtualize, IBM Spectrum Storage, IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)
