Data Insights
Data Insights Product Specification
Use of this document
This document is the functional specification definition of the product's functionality.
Overview
The Data Insights product automates inventory of PowerScale file system metadata for the purpose of reporting on file system usage.
Terms
Search & Recover GUI - User monitoring, alarms and reporting.
Functional Specification Description
Dependencies
Cluster must be licensed for Data Insights
Only available in vmware OVA and hyper-v appliance format
Product Use Case
- File system reporting
- Age of data (last modified or last accessed data stamps)
- File extension reporting
- Data owner reporting
- SMB AD user only
- Archived data reporting (Dell Cloud pools only)
- Storage pool usage reporting (Dell Storage pools only)
- Automated Scheduled reports with CSV or Excel
- GUI graphical reporting
- Path level selection to limit the reporting of usage
- Forecasting path level or device level data usage trends
- File system reporting
- Patching
The product does not support hotfix patching and requires and complete upgrade of the software version or build number to apply any patch
Operating system patches are not provided and must be downloaded directly through an out of band method and requires physical access to the secured physical equipment to apply patches, updates, or upgrades.
Compatibility
The product does not support forward compatibility with target devices and will require a software upgrade to support a forward version of a target device. This includes minor or build number changes of the target device.
Appliance Modifications
Modifying the operating system packages, removing or adding packages, changing the OS configuration and support of these changes is not covered by support and customers must support OS modifications and perform necessary testing. No support for customer modifications with the exception of applying open suse OS package patches that shipped with the original appliance or published procedure in documentation.
Operational Procedures
If documentation does not list a procedure, it is explicitly unsupported unless support provides a procedure.
Installation
This product is customer installable.
Use limitations
Combining this product with any other product is in violation of the specification & documentation unless it is found in documentation. Only equipment listed in documentation is considered authorized for use. If not listed, a written response by Superna to use alternate equipment in a vault solution is required.
Virtual appliance cpu, memory and disk latency minimum requirements must be met to maintain access to support and product warranty.
Data Insights software Automates
- Treewalking file systems and collecting metadata
- Indexing metadata
- Reporting on metadata
- Scheduling reports via email delivery
- Storage Administrator is the target user for this software solution
- Reporting via email to end users
- API access to the index
Data Insights Functions
This function automates reporting on file system data on Dell PowerScale
2 different product options are available with outside the vault network automation of and inside the vault with a different license required for inside the vault automation.
License Subscription
Data Insights based on the source device total capacity
Management
Monitor daily treewalk jobs
monitor disk usage of the appliance and expand if needed to maintain less than 80% disk utilization
Monitor scheduled email errors
Monitor index database errors
Reporting
Run on demand or scheduled reports to monitor storage usage
Moniting
email alerts or syslog alerts
Configuration
CLI only configuration
GUI is partal configuration of the product
reporting GUI or API
Data Security
Index data is not encrypted at rest
Installation Knowledge Transfer post installation
The product includes installation knowledge transfer on usage.
Operational Expectations for all deployments
Data Insights is a component of an reporting solution that must include the following best practices in order to correctly deploy the solution. The operational steps below are expected to be followed for correctly using and integrating Data Insights into a solution.
A data insights solution provides data to act on or make decisions. The product does not automate actions based on reporting.
The specification and operational management of this product Requires:
May not be in sync with the file system due to failure to monitor treewalk jobs or failure to monitor alerts that indicate database or other environmental issues that prevent the product from indexing file system metadata.
Patching and firmware updates to all hardware components that make up the vault network, vault storage and vault compute and management
Product usage assumes endpoint protection Anti-virus software is in place on all operating systems, devices, computers.
All computers with operating systems are patched regularly
All CVE's are acted upon with patches and remediation applied to all devices within the IT infrastructure.
All firewalls, security devices are running current versions and configured correctly to protect networks
The compute infrastructure is maintained and provides minimum product requirements for cpu, memory, disk latency.
The end users and IT are trained to respond to a Data Insights attack and have a run book to respond to an incident.
End users are trained regularly for phishing attacks and social attacks intended to compromise computers with Malware/Data Insights
All product alerts are acted on in a timely manner to ensure processing of audit data is protecting the file system.
Daily Mandatory operational tasks
Monitor indexing jobs are completing successfully, ensure no external network , vmware host or permissions access to the source cluster storage intefere with normal operations. Configure reports and reviewing reports and acting on report data.