Jon's bag of tricks

Having good data storage documentation makes you and your team more effective and efficient. Most importantly, though,  good storage documentation puts all the information you need at your fingertips in the event when something goes wrong (which, at some point, it will). What does good documentation look like, then? Data storage documentation—whether you create it yourself or your vendor provides it—should possess five key elements.

1. Ideally, your documentation should start with a descriptive overview of your environment. This is important for new team members, managers and consultants, allowing them to quickly familiarize themselves with your environment and what you are trying to accomplish with your infrastructure. From there we get into the meat of the documentation.

2. The document that you will probably reference the most is the connectivity map. This document, often a MS Visio diagram, should visually describe how each of the devices (servers, storage, switches, tape/virtual tape, etc.) in your storage environment are connected. These diagrams can be accurate down to the ports on the fibre channel switches and individual devices. It is often useful to include a chart on this diagram that has management interface IP addresses and device WWPNs. An additional diagram or chart included on this or near it is a storage layout document that provides a physical perspective on the disk groups. Maintaining the accuracy of these documents is a key factor in being able to plan, troubleshoot and maintain your storage environment.

3. The configuration detail section should have all the nitty-gritty details for each storage, connectivity and host device in your SAN environment. Much of this can be gathered with manufacturer provided tools and then compiled; however, key elements to record are management interface information (IP, user(s), passwords), driver versions, firmware versions, and software versions. Other items to record include WWPN addresses and switch port connections.

4. Regardless of the size of your environment, you should maintain a change-log. At a minimum, record when a change was made, who made it, and what was done. This will prove invaluable when something breaks or something is "fixed." The change-log can provide critical insight during failure analysis or when troubleshooting performance problems. Procedural guides provide a quick way to refresh your memory or assist new team members with tasks that are not frequently performed. Whether it is configuring a new server on the SAN, setting up a new replication consistency group or adding drives to your NAS, documenting the steps and using that document as a checklist provides consistent, repeatable results.

5. The most critical part of your documentation is the support information. Having the manufacturer phone numbers, site IDs, and device serial numbers (from the configuration detail) at your fingertips will shave critical time off of problem resolution. It is also important to have your integrator's contact information in this section, as they can serve as a liaison with the manufacturer to escalate cases when necessary.