Software » SERP™ » Q&A

A: SERP is an enterprise reporting tool that correlates storage usage data with business information, providing storage managers and executives with the insight they need to make critical infrastructure decisions. SERP pulls data from all major SRM tools and correlates it with a customer's asset management system, enabling users to answer questions such as:

• Which LOBs can be migrated to less expensive storage?
• Which LOBs would be impacted by a storage consolidation or upgrade effort?
• Are there opportunities to reclaim storage?
• Is storage capacity managed appropriately?

Until the introduction of SERP, attempts to answer these questions typically involved spending countless hours extracting usage information from multiple management tools just to deliver a point in time view—a process that was inefficient and not scalable for large deployments. SERP automates the process, delivers scores of customizable reports, scales to meet the needs of the largest storage infrastructures, while enabling business analytics.

A: Since its introduction this year, SERP has been deployed at four of the top ten financials in the world and currently reports on over 20 petabytes of storage infrastructure on five continents.

A: Product Features

• Storage Intelligence: SERP's correlation engine leverages data from existing SRM software and correlates it to the data of record from asset management systems, which gives an enterprise the ability to have in-depth and accurate reporting on storage for different business units across datacenters worldwide.
• Scheduled Reporting: SERP allows users to schedule reports to run at regular intervals (e.g. hourly, weekly, monthly, etc).
• Secure web-based reporting: SERP includes a drag-and-drop interface for creating custom reports, including scheduling and distribution capabilities, making it easy to perform sophisticated analysis on SAN (storage area network) infrastructures.
• Scalability: SERP can be deployed incrementally. Storage managers can add data centers as needed, allowing immediate insight into any storage environment. SERP has the ability to consolidate regional deployments into a global view.

A: SERP is an agentless product that collects data directly from existing SRM and asset management tools. Hardware and software requirements include a dedicated server as well as access to an Oracle™ database (which we can provide if the client prefers). Large deployments may require more capacity than what's indicated here.

Server

• Two 3.0 GHz processors, 4GB RAM, 40GB Hard Drive,
• Windows 2000 Server SP4, OR
• Windows Server 2003 (Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web Editions)
• Apache / Tomcat 5.0.27 (ships with SERP™)

Database

• Oracle 9i
• 50GB space

Client computers

• Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1, SP2
• Java JDK 1.4.2_08+ (ships with SERP™)

A: SERP currently supports the top SRM off-the-shelf products as well as proprietary custom developed SRM products at our customer sites. Major off-the-shelf products supported include EMC Control Center, HDS HSSM, HDS HDvM, Netapp Operations Manager, HP Storage Essentials, Sun Storage Essentials. Support expansion for IBM TPC is coming soon. Expansion to additional SRM products is covered in the product roadmap.

A: SERP supports many asset management systems including but not limited to Peregrine, Unicenter, and a host of custom customer developed asset management applications. Additionally any asset system that has the ability to export its data into CSV or Excel format will most likely work with SERP.

A: The SERP application runs on Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003. The database can be run on this host or any other qualified server that the SERP server can connect to.

A: SERP is not a management tool and thus does not have any impact on the performance of the storage environment. SERP provides configuration exception reports which identify out-of-rev components correlated by location and ownership worldwide. This helps administrators rapidly identify and address these components ensuring smooth environment operations. SERP also pinpoints the location and ownership of underutilized and trapped assets. This enables accelerated storage provisioning and application impact analysis.

A: Even in multi-Petabyte environments SERP is usually fully deployed in a matter of a few weeks. We recently built a SERP solution for a multinational bank on three continents with ~3PB's in less than six weeks including training. Some environments do require data remediation which can take longer than the scenario above. SERP facilitates this process through it's exception reporting.

A: SERP installations are easy and the customer interfaces are very intuitive. Once deployed SERP's functions are clear, easy to learn and operative. At one customer, SERP has already scaled past 12 petabytes and is reporting across four continents.

A: There is no other product designed to do what SERP does. The approach of leveraging the data of record rather than re-keying it into multiple systems is unique in the marketplace. SERP is designed to correlate business to storage data and as such functionality will continue to expand with the SRM and asset management tool vendors. Additionally, as business data continues to be exposed by SERP, business users will continue to request additional functionality.

A: SERP is a unique product in the marketplace today. That said, SRM vendors have attempted to replicate SERP functionality through:

• Manual services using Crystal Reports to report data out of their SRM tools and match it to keyed-in ownership data or
• Manually copy asset data into SRM tools and make SRM the asset management system of record SERP automates this correlation process while allowing the systems of record to remain the systems of record.

A: Certainly, upon request.