By Ramakrishna Vadla, lead architect, storage management, IBM ISDL, and

Archana Chinnaiah, software engineer, IBM ISDL

IBM Storage Insights is an IBM Corp.’ cloud-based service that helps to manage complex storage infrastructures by monitoring health, capacity, and performance and making cost-saving decisions by capacity planning, storage utilization, and simplifying the reporting.

The meta-data required for storage infrastructure monitoring is collected by the Storage Insights Data collectors that are installed on the virtual servers in the premises of the customer’s data center.

The Storage Insights Data collectors do a great job of collecting configuration, status, capacity, and performance metadata about your Spectrum Virtualize storage systems. But what if there was another way to collect metadata that didn’t require installing and deploying a data collector into your environment? Wait no longer.

“You can use IBM Call Home with cloud services to create a direct connection between your IBM Spectrum Virtualize storage systems and IBM Storage Insights with no data collector required.“

When you enable ‘Call Home’ with cloud services on a Spectrum Virtualize storage system, you now have the option to integrate that storage system with Storage Insights. With this supercharged integration, you can collect the same metadata as a data collector and send it securely to IBM Cloud for analysis and reporting in Storage Insights. This will reduce the time to value by,

Not having to obtain a VM
Not having to download and deploy the data collector.
Not having to configure additional firewall rules for data collectors.
No data collector to maintain and upgrade

The ability to use ‘Call Home’ with cloud services for monitoring is available for IBM SAN Volume Controller and the FlashSystem family that meet the following requirements: