Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting - Host Metrics (5 of 10)

Moving on to the metrics, for occupancy the key metric is utilization. How much storage are we using and how much is available?

Below are some host metrics that are typically available, these metrics are available at the file system, volume, or logical disk levels.

Array Metrics 

The illustration below shows an example of occupancy metrics from the array perspective. This is an example of Netapp filer aggregate metrics (down at the aggregate level).

A lot of these Storage arrays, from the different vendors, have different ways to carve up the storage.  Storage groups can be configured as in this example, using NetApp aggregates, which can have many occupancy metrics at different levels.

Some of the NetApp occupancy levels here are not available on the host in general.

I’ll pick out a few of the metrics:

De-dupe – If this is turned on you can find out how much space you’re saving

Total Committed space – A lot of vendors now offer thin provisioning where storage can be over-committed so it looks as though there is more storage than is really available, this allows you to see how over-committed you really are.

athene^®, our capacity management solution, brings in metrics from any data source so storage metrics can be part of the overall capacity management process.

On Friday I’ll be taking a look at Virtual Environments & Clusters.

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant