3PAR has unveiled three new platform enhancements designed to automate and streamline storage server provisioning, particularly in clustered and virtual server environments.
The utility storage software Autonomic Groups designed to enhance datacentre agility and efficiency, enables users to create volume groups on 3PAR InServ Storage Servers, and expedite storage provisioning, monitoring, and data protection in clustered and virtual server environments, the company said.
The company has also announced 3PAR Scheduler that provides an automated scheduling facility for routine execution of InServ provisioning commands while Host Explorer automates host discovery and collection of detailed InServ host configuration information. The products minimise repetitive, time consuming, and error-prone administration tasks by making storage provisioning and host discovery autonomic, the company claims.
According to the 3PAR, the Autonomic Groups streamlines the provisioning process by reducing it from days to minutes. The initial provisioning process is simplified as is ongoing provisioning, which is handled automatically by the InServ. It also simplifies reporting.by enabling users to pull boot and data disk utilization statistics from different clusters with just a single command.
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In addition, when used together with 3PAR Virtual Domains, Autonomic Groups allows multiple independent virtual domains (virtual private arrays) to be grouped as a single logical entity to simplify storage administration while maintaining the integrity of individual virtual domains.
Like Autonomic Groups, 3PAR Scheduler helps automate storage management by reducing administration time and decreasing the chance of administrative error. When used in conjunction with Autonomic Groups, 3PAR Scheduler automates virtual copy snapshots across multiple boot and data volumes with full write consistency across all these different volumes, the company said.
3PAR said that the Host Explorer augments these administrative efficiencies by automating host discovery and collection of detailed configuration information critical to speeding provisioning and simplifying maintenance. Running as an agent on the server, the Host Explorer automatically communicates host information such as Fibre Channel World Wide Name (WWN) and host multipath data to the InServ.
3PAR Autonomic Groups and 3PAR Scheduler are bundled products that are part of the latest version of the InForm Operating System. 3PAR Host Explorer is host-based software running on Windows, Linux, and Solaris 10 hosts.
