Section A: About managing multiple appliances

What is multiple appliance management?

As companies expand their data storage networks, the IT costs associated with managing the new data storage devices typically increase as well because of the effort required to individually monitor and maintain the storage devices.

Network Appliance provides two appliance-management tools designed to reduce administrative overhead, the DataFabric Manager software and the on-board multiple-appliance management feature. These appliance management tools are useful in the following situations:

You need to set up multiple appliances. Rather than manually configuring each appliance through the Appliance Manager, you can copy settings from a source appliance in their entirety to the other appliances.
You have a large network of appliances and a set of configurations, such as ACL rules or group memberships, that you must frequently update and apply to more than one appliance uniformly.

DataFabric Manager is a robust appliance management product with many other monitoring capabilities. For more information about DataFabric Manager, see the DataFabric Manager Administration Guide and Section B, Working with DataFabric Manager.

For more information about the on-board multiple-appliance management feature, see Section C, Using the multiple-appliance management feature.