CA Vantage and Zowe
Reducing the Strain on Storage Administrators
By Mihai Ficiorita, Scott Madey, and James Branam
Storage Administrators are frequently asked to provide information on the storage environment. For example, application owners wondering how much space their applications are consuming, or the finance department needing details to produce billing. Vantage now provides a method for non-storage personnel to get the data they need, without impacting storage administrators.
Since Zowe was first introduced to the mainframe world in 2018 at SHARE, Broadcom has been looking for more ways to utilize the technology that Zowe offers. Product after product has created its own application layer interface to comply with Zowe standards. The most recent Broadcom product to achieve this milestone is CA Vantage Storage Resource Manager, one of the top mainframe storage solutions on the market. Harnessing the power of Zowe can accelerate the proficiency of employees with less experience with the mainframe with its high level of common functionality, interoperability, and user experience.
Use Case: Request for storage utilization information for billing department
Alice, an accountant at a large financial firm, is required to issue invoices at the end of each month to subsidiary franchises for their storage usage. These invoices are based on data collected from CA Vantage about space utilization. At the end of each month Alice makes a request to the storage administration team to send her a monthly usage report by application. These reports arrive in Alice’s inbox as soon as the storage administrators have time to process her request.
Solution: CA Vantage REST API and Zowe
Leveraging the CA Vantage REST API, and with minimal programming skills, Alice can place GET calls for the desired data whenever it is needed, thus saving the Storage Administrator’s time used to compile and send the data to Alice. Alice writes the call once and re-uses it whenever she needs the data. She no longer has to wait on the storage administrator to process her request, saving both of them time.
The data retrieved can be both real-time data and data collected at a pre-defined periodic intervals, based on the actual needs of the user. In a larger environment (or multi-host environment), Alice would need to know the IP address and port of the initiated task on the host to correctly place the API call. If further analysis is required, the CA Vantage REST API integration with Zowe opens the door to create in-house solutions where users like Alice can place API calls to multiple API products enabled in the same interface. Data returned can be further processed by third-party applications for data visualization (such as Grafana or CABI). Moreover, Alice does not have to remember the details of the task initiated on the host (e.g., IP and port), but instead can create a specific name describing the LPAR (e.g., Production). The result is a billing process that is more flexible and transparent.
The CA Vantage REST API is a one-to-one API call solution to receive object data. More products are leveraging the Zowe integration enabling one to many API calls, so users like Alice or developers can eventually expand on the solution.
If further data is required for billing (e.g., CPU time for address space), as long as the product providing the data is API enabled and Zowe conformant, Alice can just issue a GET call in the same interface used for storage data.
CA Vantage API supports GET, POST and PUT calls, allowing not only the retrieval of data from the host, but also performing configuration. Our goal is for the API to replace the current in-house solution from the functionality perspective, but we understand that this can take some time. However, now that CA Vantage has become Zowe conformant, another door to easier and more practical solutions has been opened.
The following link can be used to view a brief tutorial on using the REST- API:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTjX2r9f47Y&t=134s
Documentation on using the Vantage REST-API can be found here:
Learn more about Zowe at this site; more Zowe blogs here.
