Are you familiar with the moment when you suddenly understand that something you changed helped a lot of people?
Did you ever produce something that you know has been a missing piece for years, and that its addition will change and help hundreds of people?
Well, we did.
A request from customers
For the last 7 years, we’ve heard from hundreds of customers that they are missing a feature. Not just a feature, but rather a concept is missing in our Storage product.
We tried to analyze its essence and to find immediate solutions using scripts, scheduled jobs, and just about anything that is integrated with the user operating system.
And it helped. Our customers (a very high percentage of them) are using ad-hoc solutions using shell scripts, DOS scripts, scheduled jobs, and so forth, in order to have a simple capability of Snapshot scheduling for free.
(Snapshot = a copy of my storage data at a particular point in time from which to recover, a.k.a. backup
Scheduler = the ability to set specific times on a regular basis using a backup policy which activates Snapshots in my Storage organization)Now its available
Our customers need it every day to be safe.
Safety is of the highest priority in our Enterprise Storage box (IBM XIV or IBM Flash System A9000/R).
So, after many years, we decided to examine this request and its real needs, together with design partners/customers, to implement it as part of our Management Tools GUI application that manages both IBM XIV and IBM Flash System A9000/R storage systems in a single pane of glass, for free.
The new feature is available
for free in IBM Hyper-Scale Manager v5.3 on any IBM XIV or IBM FlashSystem A9000/R version.
All you need to do is upgrade/install the latest IBM Hyper-Scale Manager and voilà – it’s there, ready to use!
Scheduling made easy
The Snapshot Scheduler we developed is replacing all the scripts/schedulers/ad-hoc solutions that customers have been used to using in past years and offers, in a simple and intuitive interface, the complete solution for an automatic snapshot lifecycle – from defining a time range, through the objects to work on, to validating that snapshots are really being created by the policy the user defined, and if not, informing the user that snapshots are missing.
1+1=3!
The integration of the Snapshot Scheduler into the Hyper-Scale Manager GUI application is incredible. It’s part of it, embedded into the daily tools of the Storage Administrator and the monitoring tools available in the GUI. Even from the Dashboard, the status of the snapshot policies are displayed in an easy-to-use way, allowing our users to sleep well at night, knowing that their scheduled snapshot jobs are automated and constantly monitored, without missing even 1 snapshot.
The most advanced tool out there
Thanks to our Design team that worked with customers for the last 3 years to define the innovative requirements, our Architecture team that defined the manner in which to implement these requirements, and our Development team that worked very hard for an entire year to achieve the desired solution, we now have an advanced tool to schedule snapshots, integrated into A9000/R and XIV element manager, and one of the most intuitive tools for automation.
Try it. You will surely smile.