HP Storage Essentials V5.1 User Guide First Edition (T4283-96026, August 2006)

Storage Essentials 5.1 User Guide 3
The Documentation Center provides the documentation set for Storage Essentials, including the
PDFs, online help, release notes, and support matrix.
Figure 3 Accessing the Documentation Center
To manage and monitor your elements in Storage Essentials, discover your elements in HP Systems
Insight Manager or HP Storage Essentials.
This product provides two types of discovery:
• Discovery from HP SIM - Lets you perform all of your discovery tasks within the framework of
Systems Insight Manager. Use Discovery from HP SIM if you are familiar with the HP SIM
interface. Use Discovery from HP SIM when you want to manage and monitor not only storage,
but other elements on your network, such as printers, enclosers and racks.
• Discovery from HP SE - Lets you perform all of your discovery tasks within the framework of
Storage Essentials. Use Discovery from HP SE if you are familiar with the HP SE interface. Use
Discovery from HP SE if you want to manage and monitor only storage.
See ”Discovering Applications, Backup Servers and Hosts” on page 105 and ”Discovering
Applications, Backup Servers and Hosts” on page 105.
Storage Essentials runs on a central server, and it relies upon CIM Extensions to provide
information about hosts and applications. A CIM Extension is a small software program that
gathers information about a host and its applications. The CIM Extension then provides the
information it has gathered to Storage Essentials. If you want to monitor a host and its applications,
install a CIM Extension on the host. Refer to the Installation Guide for more information on how to
install CIM Extensions.
Storage Essentials can simplify your complex environment and lower your cost of management with
CIM-based integrated storage management. The management software integrates the management
of applications, servers, storage networks and storage systems in a single, easy to implement and
intuitive solution.
The management server integrates the various components in the storage area network
infrastructure into a CIM/WBEM/SMI standards based database so you can eliminate any vendor
dependencies and view and manage your infrastructure as a whole. A SAN is a network
configuration that is dedicated to transporting storage data among network devices, such as
storage systems, servers, tape libraries, and switches. Since the SAN is dedicated to transporting
storage data, it frees up the data network for regular TCP/IP traffic.
By giving your administrators a single, integrated console to manage tactical activities such as
provisioning storage, managing real time events, installing new applications, and migrating
servers and storage, as well as strategic activities such as forecasting, planning and cost analysis.