The Different User Interfaces of IBM Storage Insights

I’m asked on a pretty frequent basis by customers, business partners, and IBM sellers on what the difference is between the offerings of IBM Storage Insights (SI). I typically say … well there is IBM Storage Insights (free/entitled), IBM Storage Insights Pro, and the IBM support view of IBM Storage Insights … but this still remains unclear in the minds of most people unless I do a demo and show the breakdown. So I decided to take a different approach here and explain it in another way, a bit different than a video and what is in the IBM Storage Insights Knowledge Center.

In the above image you will see the different menu presentations depending on the level of IBM Storage Insights you are currently using (at the time of this writing). The top image shows IBM Storage Insights (free/entitled), the second image you will see IBM Storage Insights Pro (subscription or IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control), and the third image is the IBM Support view of IBM Storage Insights (when support is engaged to look at collected customer data).

The images below are the details of submenus and differences in the menu structure of each offering. It’s worth mentioning that each menu choice has a deeper presentation of data and I’m just giving you the high level here. I’ll see what I can do to create some additional blog posts on targeted areas of the product depending on feedback from you.

Also, if you want to briefly talk about IBM Storage Insights or see a demo using real data … reach out to me on my About page … and don’t forget to follow the blog to get updates when I post.

Enjoy! #IBMStorage #storageinsights #WSCstorage #flashsystem

– Dom

90 Day Free Trial of IBM Spectrum Control

If you have always wanted to give IBM Spectrum Control a try in your own datacenter, now you can using the IBM Spectrum Control POC Virtual Appliance for 90 days. Just use this link to access the download page and eventually get to downloading around a 4+ GB zip file.

Once the zip file is uncompressed you have a set of VMware files (OVF) you can import into a VMware environment.

Some of the minimum hypervisor requirements as of this writing are:

  • 75GB of free disk space in the hypervisor
  • 16GB of memory in the hypervisor
  • 4 CPU cores in the hypervisor

Further instructions are in the readme file as part of the zip package.

Of course you will need IBM Storage to connect to or supported SMI-S connected Storage to populate IBM Spectrum Control … and … it goes without saying.

This IBM Spectrum Control POC Virtual Appliance is ONLY intended for product evaluation and NOT to be used for production or for customer distribution. There is also no IBM Support.

Enjoy!

– Dom

IBM Storage Monitoring and Management Options for the IBM FlashSystem 9200

This video is a presentation I made of the IBM Storage Monitoring & Management Options for the IBM FlashSystem 9200 using the IBM Washington Systems Center resources. This covers the software update to IBM Storage Insights and IBM Spectrum Control that occurred in March 2020.

A PDF of the presentation from the video is here.