The MetricStore service is ideally suited to organisations with storage located in their own Data Centre to provide:

• Full remote management for a fixed monthly fee aligned to specific client requirements.
• Proactive remote monitoring for a fixed monthly fee but with access to the specialist storage personnel of OCSL-MS to enhance a business’s own IT skills on a consultancy basis.

OCSL-MS developed MetricStore to address typical IT pains such as the following:

• A business does not see a problem on the storage but tend to see it on the application/host server.
• Applications run slow - end users complaining that email slow or network share slow.
• Do not appear to have sufficient storage space thereby impacting performance of devices connected
• Operational downtime due to storage issues such as saving data or corrupted data.

The amount of resource effort to investigate issues such as these is both complex and costly when layered onto normal operations.

The MetricStore service removes this day to day management from an internal IT team through 24/7 monitoring and analysis of the storage, checking that’s its configured best for the application environment and ensuring it is delivering optimal value to a business.   

• Infrastructure usage and performance measurement information
• Monitoring storage devices.
• Providing analysis and trending data on storage devices.
• Capacity planning on storage devices.
• How to improve the storage device performance to deliver business value.
• Fulfilling skills shortages or enabling existing IT resource to concentrate on other aspects of a business to drive this forward.

Key features of a MetricStore service include:

• Near real time monitoring and alerting – MetricStore will provide businesses with monitoring to help it realise performance excellence by continuously monitoring resources from the application to the storage system.

           - Typical performance metrics logged, stored and plotted for both near-time and
              historical data.
           - Graphs for storage devices and fabric switches available on-line 24/7 including:
               - IOLevels on physical and virtual disk basis
               - IO Levels against controller ports
               - Disk and host queue depths

• Reporting – Whilst information is available on-line 24/7 OCSL-MS will supply clients with a monthly customised recommendation report, which will provide guidance on specific aspects of your storage system, such as bottlenecks or future storage management capacity requirements. This report is always delivered via a formal meeting process.
• Provisioning – OCSL-MS can provide businesses with fully managed storage provisioning.
• Effective utilisation – OCSL-MS will ensure that the storage platform in which an organisation has invested is being used efficiently and to the maximum utilisation levels.
• Trending – MetricStore will monitor partial or whole aspects of a business’s storage environment. Tuning software generates reports from host to the spindle providing in-depth analysis.
• Proactive maintenance – OCSL-MS can manage host bus adapter firmware and microcode upgrades, compatibility checks and the reclamation of old storage all whilst maintaining up to date documentation for an environment.
• Advice on firmware upgrades – OCSL-MS will provide clients with detail on firmware upgrades that should be considered.
• Expertise – OCSL-MS has a team of certified storage experts, so clients can call upon this for advice. Additionally these resources can be used by a business to provide additional assistance although charges may be applicable depending on the request made.
• Adherence to service levels – OCSL-MS will help businesses define and meet service level agreements and objectives.

• Ensure one of the most expensive IT assets you hold is constantly analysed to ensure it is optimally configured at all times to deliver business value.
• Benefit from interacting with storage specialists to deliver knowledge and recommendations on how best to use its storage device.
• Free up existing IT resource to concentrate on other business related project work.
• Receive monthly reports delivered by a storage specialist but in a manner that both a technical and non technical audience can understand and gain value from.
• Be able to review your storage performance 24/7 through an on-line customer portal.
• Ensure you learn about potential issues before they become real problems.
• Be able to plan effectively for future growth through knowledge and understanding of your storage devices capacity and performance.
• Be able to set service level agreements based upon criteria needed to ensure your IT staff are aware of any impending issues.

OCSL-MS MetricStore service has been designed for HP Enterprise Storage devices; 3-PAR, XP, EVA and Brocade or Cisco based SAN switches.
 
As part of the service a 1 ‘U’ resilient appliance will be installed on your site, which gathers the key metrics and information on your environment as well as historical trending.
 
A site to site VPN will also be configured from OCSL-MS primary data centre facility in Cambridgeshire to talk to this device and extrapolate data back to the storage experts who reside at this location for analysis and reporting.

Download the MetricStore Service Guide here