HPE Storage Users Group

I am attaching this at full size to just illustrate how inefficient the use of screen is in SSMC. Even with 3/4 of the screen I can not get a list that will not line wrap the volume names. Not to mention I have to expand the pane to even get this view. I recall in the day I did some UI testing and tasks were defined to be measured and the number of actions/steps/clicks it took a user to get that task done were measured and that was how the effectiveness of the UI was measured. Not seeing how SSMC is less steps (more productive) to get most of my tasks done when on almost every task I have to re-size panes and click buttons to see what I need.

Another example. When editing a volume you are basically using the entire screen height (1600x1200 rez) and it is half blank, and I have to hit Edit additional settings to get are what I consider some basic common info and settings that was availble in th eIMC and used far less screen real estate.

I was checking dedup ratios on our afa. There are two cgps with same settings (raid set size, step size, growth increment).

Cli "showspace -cpg <CPG>" displays equal "EstFree"/"LDFree" for both cpgs, but ssmc displays different "Estimated usable free space"-values. It shows a smaller value for the cpg with the better (bigger) dedup ratio.

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Thanks for providing the screenshot, it seems the values is not updating, we are looking into why.

I think there are also some optimizations we can do so user can choose to have all advanced options enabled by default.

Same for the wrapping we can definitely do better there.

My SSMC feedback:

Don't like the password rules for the Administrator console - this should be a user option on the strength of the password and not forced. I am more likely to have to make a physical note of a password like this than something that is slightly simpler.

Map view is a nice feature

System Reporter section is good but I don't think it is ready to replace the external tool yet.

Can right click and copy now - was unable to do this within IMC

I really don't find it that easy to navigate around. IMC was a lot more clearer. Too many windows have scroll bars on one screen.

IMC has a better feel to it and I think techies prefer this than something that looks very basic. SSMC feels "too simple" and doesn't feel like a solid robust tool. I liked the summary screen within IMC where you could do one final check before you performed the action if you wanted to. This is no longer available.

Very difficult to use on a laptop screen. I install 3PAR's and need the management interface on my laptop and IMC is now just about useable but I find SSMC isn't and to get the most out of it, you need a large monitor.

Creating Remote Copy group - there doesn't appear to select different CPG's for the remote volume creation. The dialogue isn't very clear.

The "load more" feature is annoying. I want to be able to view all of the volumes at the first attempt and not have to keep selecting "load more" to load the details I want to see.

The option to only view the unexported volumes has gone. In my role as an installer this was a very handy feature to be able to filter out the exported volumes.

I have also had the question off a customer asking why they have to have 2 CPU's for this product. It is currently installed on a Virtual machine in their environment and they want a justification to add the second CPU to the VM. IMC was fine with 1 CPU (although there is a lag issue on the Remote Copy screens, especially if you don't have a lot of memory)

I also think it's a mistake to try and hide IMC away now on www.software.hp.com when SSMC still can't do all of the tasks that IMC can.

In my honest opinion I prefer IMC and hope it's not discontinued although I suspect it will be on future firmware releases. Sometimes things are fine as they are. A good example is that recently HP tried to get rid of HP Product Bulletin and replace it with a "better" product but after all of the feedback they thankfully reversed the decision.

I find SSMC to be a bit of a pig, to manage 6 arrays and over 22K volumes my SSMC system has 16Gb of RAM and 8 vCPUs and that seems reasonable performance now, I think I could trim the vCPUs to 4-6, but they get busy easily. I find that Java alone on my SSMC eats 10GB easily.

this is very good and constructive feedback. Thanks for taking the time.

I am a bit confused about the search bar. If I start typing in the search bar I see some results begin to form in the drop down. One of them seems to be my previous search history which if I scroll down and select just blanks out the search bar forcing me to retype my search. This is extremely confusing and not intuitive at all.

OK I realize SSMC is a work in progress, and to be at 2.1 is really misleading, this is at best a 1.0 or 1.1 product. I have at least 5 cases open with HP support on numerous SSMC issues and have been trying for the last 5 weeks to make it my primary console. At this point I am falling back to IMC now as my primary console as the SSMC is too inefficient in its use of screen real estate. You need a 30 inch 4K monitor to effectively use SSMC as to be near as productive as IMC.

Also all the scroll and "load more" clicks is driving my nuts as my arrays have hundreds of base volumes and thousands of copies.

With Remote Copy Grousp in IMC I could multi-select groups and then do start/stop actions, in SSMC I can only do one at a time. With over 300 RC Groups there are tiems we have to stop/start dozens of groups at a time, in SSMC this is a one at a time process, in IMC this si a 1 step process.


Also this applies to IMC and SSMC, I am baffled as to why I have to have both the source and destination arrays selected to perform a RC Group function, are the consoles and arrays not smart enough to know which 2 arrays are in a RC Group? Selecting the primary side should be all that is needed.