Two Distinct Aspects of Storage Capacity - Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting (2 of 10)

As mentioned there are two distinct aspects of data storage.

Data can come from all different directions to the disk:

Disk occupancy

Disks used to be very expensive but now the costs have come down dramatically and this cost factor has accelerated the growth of storage.

You may have too little storage resulting in out of disk space problems but conversely you may have storage over-allocated. A lot of times people put excessive storage space out there to ensure that they never run out and don’t pay attention to how much they really need and what their growth really is going to be.

Below is a typical service center queuing diagram.

In many cases the requests are being sent out by an application or applications. There is a finite limitation on the requests per second that can be satisfied and then a queue begins to form. The queuing theory comes in to play where you have limitations on the throughput of your I/O and at some point this will have a response impact. The response impact transfers up through the application to the user and results in a slow response time, a performance problem.

On Friday I’ll be looking at space utilization. There's still time to sign up and come along to our webinar tomorrow Proactive storage performance management Register now  http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html

Dale Feiste
Principal Consultant