New 3PAR Tool – StoreFront Remote

An additional tool has become available for 3PAR – StoreFront Remote. This new web based tool is not used for management but for analytics on multiple 3PAR systems

How do I get it?

It’s a web based tool so no additional software is required. But what you do have to do is register each 3PAR system you wish to monitor in the interface. To register the systems you just need to add a text string to the comments section of each 3PAR, you can do this using the IMC, SSMC or CLI. The steps below cover doing it through the CLI:

1 From your web browser visit https://www.storefrontremote.com. You can login with A HP Passport ID

2 When you login it will prompt you to add systems and at the top of the instructions you will be provided with a text string which will look something like : StoreFrontRemoteAccess(timXHKJDHJDSHSJDHDJKYT,[email protected])

3 from the CLI enter

setsys -comment StoreFrontRemoteAccess(timXHKJDHJDSHSJDHDJKYT,[email protected])

 

The system needs to be configured for dial home to HP to be added. The systems you add will become available in the dashboard after 24-48 hours.

 

What does it do?

The first thing you are going to notice is that the look has been modelled on SSMC and OneView, so if you are familiar with these you are going to find navigation fairly straight forward. Like SSMC when you open it you start with a dashboard view which lists all your connected systems. It’s a highly scalable system, the demo from HP on the inbuilt help shows over 200+ connected systems.

This is an analytics tool and I would guess it’s an enhanced version of what was previously an in house pre-sales tool. The best thing to do is going to be to dive in there and give it a go, so the intention in this post is just to give a quick whirlwind tour of what the tool can do.

 

Dashboard View

When you login you will see a dashboard view of all your connected systems. This is a high level summary showing things like capacity, location and model.

1 dashboard

 

You can add and remove the dashboard panels or dashlets you would like to see

2 add dashboard pannel

Like in SSMC you can use the search box and click on items such as the OS version to filter down to see only systems with the selected version. You can also filter using a number of inbuilt reports shown in the screenshot below.

3 filter reports

System View

The other main view is the system view. Once in the system view if you choose hide details you are shown a table of all connected systems. This could be useful for example if you want to drill down and produce a list of systems on a certain OS or with a particular free capacity left.

5 table view

You can filter and add remove columns in this view

6 add columns

If you then choose show details you get all systems listed on the left and with a number of different detailed views shown on the right such as overview, status details, licence, physical disk details and system front end performance. The following is an example of a chart from the front end performance.

IOPs

This is another useful chart showing capacity trend over time:

4 capacity

Conclusion

This isn’t going to replace SSMC as your go to performance tool but I think where this is going to come into its own is in trending, capacity management and planning. If you are managing a large number of systems this will easily highlight the hot spots and also present the information in a clear customer friendly format.

 

To stay in touch with more 3PAR news and tips connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

 

 

 

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6 thoughts on “New 3PAR Tool – StoreFront Remote

  1. Information about how to register StoreOnce is now available in StoreFront Remote. Have to use the registration token from Storefront Remote and use it at the StoreOnce under RemoteSupportCustomer informationHP Passport id. Supported from SW Version 3.12.

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