White Papers
BP1028 EqualLogic iSCSI for Fibre Channel Professionals 13
8 Storage management
Many traditional enterprise storage systems utilize licensing tiers or add-ons to enable advanced
features such as snapshots, clones, replication, and advanced monitoring or systems management.
When one of these features is required, a license must be purchased to enable that additional
functionality. Sometimes even the addition of storage capacity requires a license or feature upgrade.
EqualLogic PS Series storage provides many features that are found in other high-end enterprise
systems, but instead of offering these at additional cost, they are included as part of its all-inclusive
feature set. Group Manager allows the storage admin to configure, maintain, and monitor the arrays
as well as provision volumes to hosts. Group Manager also provides capabilities for e-mail notification
and configuring SNMP monitoring.
Beyond the day to day administration capabilities of the Group Manager application, Dell also offers
the EqualLogic SAN Head Quarters (SAN HQ) tool – again at no additional charge. SAN HQ can be
used to monitor storage capacity and performance over time. It gathers statistics and can offer real-
time as well as historical information about entire SANs, groups of arrays, pools, individual arrays, or
even individual volumes.
Figure 6 - SAN HQ "Live View" Session