Dell Storage Resource Manager Reviews

The most valuable features of either of the SRM tools, were the reporting and real-time ability to show management that additional storage was required or in regards to who was using what storage and bandwidth.

All the attributes of the tool had real importance, when you needed time to create some reports for the management and to email those reports on a regular basis.

By the time they rolled out its predecessor SMC and Unisphere, the old ECC was trying to do too much within a large enterprise environment.

We were unhappy as no one from EMC heard our plea for assistance and it became expensive in terms of the license and the amount of resources it took.

Simply put, in the past the vendor support model was not broad enough to ensure every aspect of the ECC product worked efficiently.

After a few years of waiting for EMC to apply the fixes we wanted they were finally all addressed.

The stability of the products was very similar as well.

The scalability of both the products was pretty even.

The technical support was very good for both the NetApp OCI and the EMC ViPR.

It is at this time that we switched to NetApp's OCI. It was somewhat reasonably priced and easy to install with VMs, instead of all the physical hosts that EMC wanted at that time.

We were somewhat happy with OCI and it was less costly.

The ease of installation looked to be the same.

The price was also about the same.

Then I changed companies and we started looking at EMC's ViPR SRM. Upon examination, it looked very much under the covers like the NetApp OCI solution.

I am now with yet another company and they have purchased EMC ViPR SRM. I think I will be happy with it, provided that EMC listens to its customers and fixes issues, as it has grown-up.

Early on in history, the EMC Control Center was a very powerful tool and had many robust parts/pieces to it.

Managing multiple storage arrays under one console was a valuable feature of this product.

It made life easy by allowing us to manage multiple storage arrays under one console.

It needed improvement with its stability. Also, since it was agent-based communication, we always had to ensure that the agents were running on the servers all the time.

I used this product for around three years.

We had limited the usage to only managing the storage arrays, although we had switches discovered under it and were using the StorageScope application for capacity reporting.

The technical support was good.

We only used ECC until I left that particular organization.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

To be frank, I believe there are many other applications that allow us to manage the array, along with in-depth analysis. Even EMC has developed better products than ECC.

• Centralized administration
• Management of SAN environment in the organization

• Ease of administration
• Fits in well with all the EMC SAN storage

I would like to see third-party storage management.

We have been using this solution for five years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The installation was pretty straightforward.

It boils down to how you negotiate with the vendor.

Go for it if your organization is EMC-centric storage.

The alerting feature is valuable because it completes the gap of storage monitoring. Often the storage comes with a tele-diagnostic service. For security purposes, it’s very important for us to be aware of every single failure in order to be more proactive and not only reactive.

We use the SNMP gateway to aggregate hardware and performance events.

The use of agents is not easy. The architectural design of using every single agent for every type of storage can be reviewed with the use of general proxies.

The general proxies also discover other vendors’ storage. This can be done with custom made scripts.

We have been using this solution for five years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

There were some scalability issues because we needed several agent servers.

The installation was complex because we had to setup multiple servers.

We evaluated these solutions: 

• NetApp OnCommand Insight
• HPE
• IBM Productivity Suite

It’s very important to plan the correct setup of agent servers.