Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting - Space Utilization (3 of 10)

What does storage ‘Utilization’ mean in your environment?

Utilization can be a variable definition and there are many factors to take in to account, these include RAID/DR, Raw/Configured, Host/SAN, Backups, Compression, Etc...

The term utilization can depend on whether you are including any of these factors and it is useful to know exactly what you wish to include and report on when determining whether you have under or over-utilized storage capacity.

Occupancy – Visibility

Once you have defined what you wish to include in your reports you can start collecting the data.

The chart below illustrates space used on a file system and is a regular trend chart with a threshold, as you can see moving out in to the future it is going to exceed the threshold. You can use trending to report on a number of metrics but when an application is going to run out of space it is going to be at this level.

It’s advisable to be pro-active with trending to ensure that you can deal with any problems before they turn in to real performance problems.

Technical solutions can then be implemented to optimize storage space management, including databases.

On Monday I’ll be looking at Trending and Groups.

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

Workload Profiles, Scorecards & Dasboards - Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting(10 of 10)

As mentioned previously the Read/Write metrics can help you to get a handle on your workload profiles.

Application type is important in estimating performance risk, for instance, something like Exchange is a heavy I/O user. I’ve also seen examples where virtual workstations were being installed and resulted in a large I/O hit that could have impacted other applications sharing storage.

Scorecards

This is an example of a score card, where you can have a large amount of information condensed in to one easy to view dashboard.

Dashboards

An example below is how you can set up a dashboard and bring key trending and standard reports to you all in one place.

Trending, forecasting, and exceptions with athene®

Storage Key Metrics – Summary

To summarize

•       Knowledge of your storage architecture is critical, you may need to talk to a separate storage team to get this information

•       Define storage occupancy versus performance

•       Discuss space utilization and define

•       Review virtualization and clustering complexities

•       Explore key metrics and their limitations

•       Identify key report types and areas that are most important, start with the most critical.

I hope you've enjoyed this series and if you'd like to listen to a live recording on this subject join our Community at http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/on-demand-webinars/index.asp

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

Array Architecture and Metrics - Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting(8 of 10)

Today I said we’d take a look at Array Architecture. This is an example of an enterprise type array comprising of

•       Front End Processors

•       Shared Cache

•       Back End Processors

•       Disk Storage

A lot of time these disks can be striped across the entire array, a very large number of spindles tied together to provide a very large resource.

Quite often on these large arrays bottlenecks will occur on the front end processor, requests coming in will queue up there.

Performance Capacity – Array Metrics

As mentioned front end processors are typically the first to bottleneck, below is an example showing just one day.

This is ideal information for trending, if you picked up these processors over a period of time you could do a trend going forward and figure out when and where bottlenecks are likely to occur.

On Friday I’ll be looking at back end metrics. In the meantime sign up to belong to our Community and listen to the live recording of this series http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/on-demand-webinars/index.asp

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant