Disk Usage and Trend Analysis of Multiple Symmetrix Arrays Configured with FAST/VP

The advent of multiple layers of virtualization it has made it nearly impossible to educate customers on how the different types of disks are being utilized by various applications. Virtualization technologies such as Meta LUN, Virtual Provisioning (VP), and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) have made it difficult to create a direct disk capacity utilization report. Plus, existing tools do not help in reporting when an application is spread across multiple physical arrays.

As a result, storage administrators find it difficult to satisfactorily answer questions that customers pose, such as:

• How much of my EFD disk is being used by the SAP Application?

• If the usage is more than expected, which host in the SAP group is responsible for it?

• Which application is using most of my FC Storage?

• If my applications are only using 2.5 TB of SATA disk, why is the total usage 3 TB? Where is the extra space being used?

• Why is my ECM application using EFD space when they are not billed for it?

• What is the trend of capacity utilization of ESX across multiple arrays?

In this Knowledge Sharing article, Mumshad Mannambeth and Nasia Ullas explain a procedure they have developed to collate, analyze, and generate a report which can answer all of the above questions and more. The report is simple to understand by end users or customers who don’t know the complex architecture of FAST VP/Thin Provisioning. As well, factoring in the ‘FAST usage trending report’ with current capacity planning method provides a more accurate capacity management technique.

This report meets a critical need as no tool is currently available to analyze and report FAST VP movement of data at a sub LUN tier level, or to create a trending report per application based on FAST movement.

Read the full article.