Is here a way to manage DMX without external documentation like EXCEL?

do you have storage scope? If yes, then you could export data in cvs format.

If your host agents are configured correctly, EMC Storage scope can give you fairly updated information about your current DMX allocation. i.e. which devices are allocated to which hosts.
however, storage scope to the best of my knowledge will give you only current picture. it wont be record n report any allocations planned or reserved. it would not be able to record any additional data like who allocated the stuff and so on.

i havent used control centre much but i read somewhere that there is a allocation and reservation feature for symmetrix. can someone shed light on that?

If found StorageScope to be more worthless than actual present value. At times it seems that the developers who wrote StorageScope or ECC never really MANAGED a symm environment.

quiet possible

storage scope is much more like a reporting tool that presents the data in a laid our format. there are no management features like configuring or tweaking the symms. as said earlier, it relies on correct agents running on the hosts and symms, else you are bound to get stale data.

ECC/SymCLI is the right thing if you are thinking about configuring the symms.

is that what you meant Vince?

I totally 100% agree with Vince.
Storagescope and ECC make wonderful "shelfware". They are more trouble than they are worth. Learn the CLI and you will be greatly rewarded.

I've got to disagree with the comments about ECC and StorageScope. For many things it is true that there are easier (and more flexible) ways of doing things from the CLI, but in a large environment there are advantages to having the ECC GUI for management of multiple arrays (Symmetrix AND CLARiiON) and the StorageScope reporting is very useful in a large enterprise.

As for the question of Allocated and Reserved, StorageScope DOES report on this. It works with the Automated Resource Management piece, so if you have created a task to allocate storage but have not yet executed the task the storage will show up as Reserved. Once the task is executed it will become Allocated.

And before I get flamed left, right, and center over promoting ECC, I'm fully aware of it's (sometimes serious) shortcomings, but still find great value in it under the right circumstances. It definitely isn't the right choice for every environment, but a proper evaluation take a while. It is very powerful, very in depth, and very unintuitive (because of the depth and power). But work with it for a while and you realize there actually is a method to the madness.

I still completely agree that it was written by a bunch of engineers who never saw a storage system in their life though!!!

Allen,
There's absolutely nothing wrong with liking ECC. If it works for you in your environment, thats great. We did try a number of times to use it, but our environment is too fluid, complex and secure for it. It all depends on what works and what doesn't. Everywhere is different.

Here are two real world questions I get every day that ECC can't answer:

What is the maximum size meta lun I can provision before I wrap physicals and what are those meta members?

If 200GB is provisioned to a Host as a DB volume, what meta members can I choose that would create a 50GB log volume without sharing the same physicals as the DB volume?

It is things like this that really annoy me that EMC has not created an ECC wizard or report to address. But hey - it sure is great that ECC can create windows shares on a windows host - who cares! Why in the world would a developer even spend time developing this component?

By limiting the size of your metas to a pre-determined size and having the disk drives properly configured, will eliminate duplicating on physicals. (At least within the same meta.)

I have to agree with Allen about the usefulness of ControlCenter. Granted, it doesn't make sense to use it for all tasks - it does have some very helpful aspects.

For instance,
Alerting: If you want an email or a page everytime a hotspare is invoked or a disk fails, ControlCenter is the simplest solution.
DialHome Failures: If a service processor fails to dial home, ControlCenter can alert you and prevent a data loss due to disk failure. (How can EMC repair what it doesn't know is broken?) I've actually seen this happen!
Large Environments: It's helpful to see the overall layout of a large environment. Especially when troubleshooting or introducing new hires to a complicated storage environment.

Those are the primary reasons I launch ControlCenter. I'm sure there are others with equally pressing needs to see their complete environment.

I also recognize the limitations of managing a storage environment with a GUI. As always - knowing the CLI is crucial in understanding what is actually going on behind the scenes (or, beneath the GUI).

My two cents.....

Regards,
-julianne

I felt that ECC is not really helping me, but I had the impression I am the only one with complaint. Ok, now that other people share these thoughts. I wander if you find any solution?
is there a program that actually helping with the SAN management.

shenar,
What type of switches do you have? (Cisco, Brocade, etc?) How many?