Dell EqualLogic SAN Headquarters & SupportAssist; Making IT Easier for You

Blog has been edited to include correct spelling of SupportAssist.

Is your IT department using Dell™EqualLogic™ storage and looking for a way to measure performance and monitor events within your group? Have you heard of Dell EqualLogic’s SAN Headquarters?

Douglas Hemp, Technical Training and Curriculum Development for Dell EqualLogic shares his thoughts on SAN Headquarters and SupportAssist below.

“Monitoring your group with Dell EqualLogic SAN Headquarters (SAN HQ) is vital to your SAN’s overall SAN health. With SAN HQ, IT professionals can monitor:

  • Capacity
  • I/O
  • Performance
  • Disk Status

SAN HQ provides the monitoring of multiple groups and collects historical information in a graphical representation. Taking it one step further, SAN HQ provides your IT department a direct pathway for Dell technical support to monitor the health of your SAN with an optional component within SAN HQ called SupportAssist.

SupportAssist is a component that will enable you to collect diagnostic data and securely upload PS Series group data for analysis to the Dell technical support team. SupportAssist immediately notifies Dell support personnel and automatically creates new customer cases when a problem arises. SupportAssist collects diagnostic data in three different ways:

ü  Weekly — according to a user-specified day and time

ü  Event Driven — whenever SAN HQ receives a critical event notification through the syslog mechanism from a PS Series group

ü  On-Demand — User-driven on an as-needed basis

 

SupportAssist will output the following information:

ü  Various diagnostic commands

ü  Operating System information (such as a process list, cpu, and memory consumption.)

ü  iSCSI connections information

ü  Data volume names and Access Control information

ü  IP addresses and settings for network interfaces

ü  Customer supplied contact information.

ü  Application core dumps

ü  Hardware and disk information

ü  Group and replication settings information 

Are you looking for more information on SAN HQ and SupportAssist? Check out these online and instructor-led courses on the PartnerDirect portal course catalog.

  • Dell EqualLogic Technical Training PSST1108WBTT
  • PS Series Storage Array – Configuration, Operation and Management (PSSC0109ILTT)
  • Understanding the EQL SAN Health using SANHQ, LASSO and DPACK tools (EQLSAN0912ILTT)”

About the Author: Sara Mesarchik