PURE Storage Discovery. FlashBlade vs FlashArray

[Stephen Skaggs]

The storage expert in our environment informed me that there was documentation for FlashBlade but not FlashArray. I have checked the internet for the differences between the two but cannot find any. Please advise on any info regarding the differences, if there are any, between these alleged separate technologies. Thanks.

[Alexanderpy]

SiD, we found the pure flasharray supports SMI-S from the heads, we were trying to use this method, but the standard CIM queries are not coming back with the correct data.  I checked and pure passed a conformance SMI-S testing (https://www.snia.org/ctp/conforming_providers/pure#SMIS1.6).

Can we use SMI-S / CIM queries to acquire the storage information?  If so, this is NOT straight forward OOB.  And if we are not able to use that, then why?  We were told by everyone, CIM queries via SMI-S provider works fine, across multiple platforms.

[Stephen Skaggs · Accepted solution]

There is an idea in consideration on the Idea Portal:

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=view_idea&sysparm_idea_id=ac060e21dbd694d0fb115583ca96198c&sysparm_idea_table=x_snc_com_ideation_idea&sysparm_module_id=enhancement_requests

[KO8]

We were able to discover our Pure Flash Arrays using SMI-S. You will need to create a username/password on your array and then configure those same credentials on your SN instance (Must use CIM credential type) and ensure that SMI-S is enabled on the array as well. It's literally a radio button that you flip from off to on and is available through the Pure Management console under Settings---System. Enabling this setting doesn't require any re-boot or service re-start as well.

[praneeth gundre]

hi, we are trying to discover pure arrays . any help is greatly appreciated.

did your CIM discovery run with out any changes to the classifications on SN ?.   did  the storage server CI and other CIs getting created from discovery ?

[KO8]

Yes, no need to do modify the OOB classifier. You should really only need to configure SLP and SMI-S on the arrays that you wish to scan along with setting up CIM credentials on your instance. Listed below is a nice article that describes the CIM Discovery process. Good luck!

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/reference/r_HowCIMDiscoveryWorks.html