Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting - Trending (4 of 10)

One thing to keep in mind for trending is to understand the limitations of linear regression when trending and forecasting data.

I’ve used the graphs below as an example of this.

In the second graph you can see what will happen eventually when that bottoms out or someone goes in and allocates more storage or frees more storage up – it skews the trend line.

Space Capacity – Different Viewpoints

We’ve talked about different viewpoints when looking at your data, reports, trending and now I’m going to look at how useful it is to look at things in Groups.

You can group by Business, Application, Host, Storage Array, Billing Tier and what that really boils down to is providing more of a business or application view.

Below you can see this has been grouped to provide a commercial/business and a technical view. Application owners can go in and see how much storage they are consuming, particularly useful if you also include billing information.

Join me again on Wednesday when I’ll be discussing Host Metrics and don't forget to register now to come along to our next webinar 'Maturing the Capacity Management Process' http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

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

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

Today let’s take a look at the 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

Disk Performance Capacity

Response, IOPs

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, in the meantime why not sign up to our Community and get access to our great resources, free white papers, on-demand webinars and more.http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/index.html

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting (1 of 10)

This blog series will cover the key metrics in storage that you can use to get a handle on your storage capacity.

•        Storage Architecture – basic concepts

•        Two distinct aspects of storage capacity

•        Virtualization

•        Key metrics from the host and backend storage view

•        Reporting on what is most important

I’ll start with the history of storage architecture.

Storage has increased in complexity, as shown in the diagram below, from left to right

Large environments have gone from megabytes to petabytes in terms of Storage and this growth can result in an increase in cost and complexity. 

On Wednesday I’ll look at the 2 distinct aspects of storage capacity.

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

Trending - Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting (4 of 10)

One thing to keep in mind for trending is to understand the limitations of linear regression when trending and forecasting data.

I’ve used the graphs below as an example of this.

In the second graph you can see what will happen eventually when that bottoms out or someone goes in and allocates more storage or frees more storage up – it skews the trend line.

Different Viewpoints

We’ve talked about different viewpoints when looking at your data, reports, trending and now I’m going to look at how useful it is to look at things in Groups.

You can group by Business, Application, Host, Storage Array, Billing Tier and what that really boils down to is providing more of a business or application view.

Above you can see this has been grouped to provide a commercial/business and a technical view. Application owners can go in and see how much storage they are consuming and this is particularly useful if you also include billing information.

Join me again on Wednesday when I’ll be taking a look at Host Metrics. In the meantime why not join our community and get access to our white papers, performance tips and on-demand webinars http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/index.html

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant