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Managing Storage Capacity Needs with SentrySoftware
Current and future storage capacity needs can be efficiently managed
with the Sentry Software's connectors for BMC Capacity Optimization.
These connectors regularly collect critical capacity data for the storage systems available in your environment.
Several connectors are available. In our example,
three of them have been installed and configured in BCO:
Hitachi Device Manager ETL for BCO EMC SMI-S Agent ETL for BCO
and Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager ETL for BCO
An additional component, Storage Capacity Views and Reports for BCO, has also been installed
to display all the information collected by the three connectors in a specific view called
Storage Capacity.
This view, accessible through the Views tab, displays capacity information
for all the Hitachi, EMC, and Dell Compellent storage systems,
for all the storage pools, and for all the volumes present in the environment.
This information is particularly useful to perform all the basic management operations
that you, as a Capacity Planner, are asked to perform daily.
You can for example analyze the storage capacity utilization of your storage systems
and storage pools by simply looking at the different capacity metrics available such as the Size, Capacity,
Subscribed Capacity, Available Capacity and Consumed Capacity.
Identifying which storage pool from which storage system is best suited to host the
storage capacity required is also easy with the Storage Capacity view.
You just have to list the storage systems that meet your allocation requirements.
You can for example display the storage systems for which there are more than 15000 GB available.
Once the storage systems matching your search criteria have been displayed, you can verify
the storage systems' bandwidth and the number of ports available.
As you can see, in our example, the bandwidth utilization is low and there are enough ports
to support the load. This storage system is therefore the perfect candidate!
Now that the most relevant storage system has been identified, you just have to choose
a storage pool according to its pool type, its available capacity, and the oversubscription risk.
Ensuring that no oversubscription situation is about to occur is really important to prevent
data loss and corruption. By default, a warning is displayed in the
Oversubcription Risk column when more than 75% of the space is actually used
and when the number of days before saturation is greater than or equal to 7.
A critical notice is displayed when more than 75% of the space is actually used
and the number of days before saturation is less than 7.
This default behavior can however be modified for each storage pool if you want to be warned
earlier about an oversubscription risk.
Imagine that you want to be warned when more than 70% of the space is used:
In the Storage Pools tab, select the storage pool for which you wish to modify thresholds
Click Thresholds Click Add threshold.
From the Metric pull-down list, select Storage Used Space Percentage.
Select Fixed value. In the Good Threshold field, enter 50.
In the Warn Threshold field, enter 70. Click Save.
Your oversubscription risk indicator is now customized.
So far, I taught you how to analyze the storage capacity of your storage pools
and storage systems, how to better allocate storage capacity to your servers, and how to identify oversubscription situations.
It's now time to learn how to plan for future capacity needs!
Planning for additional storage capacity consists of:
Identifying when storage pools will be running out of capacity
Estimating by how much the capacity of the storage pools must be extended to meet allocation requirements
and verifying if there are unused disks
to extend the capacity of the existing storage pools.
Several metrics are available in the Storage Capacity view
to verify the capacity of the storage pools and more especially: their total space
their total space not consumed and their space actually consumed.
You can also see at a glance the storage pools that are at a risk of being saturated
in the Saturation Risk column. If you notice that you'll shortly be running
out of capacity and before purchasing additional storage, you can start reclaiming unused space.
Reclaiming unused space is really easy with the Storage Capacity View as it allows you
identify unused disks, as well as unmapped and unused volumes.
Identifying unused disks is possible at the storage system level. To do so, you just have
to display the details of a specific storage system and have a look at the metric
Available for Storage pools to know exactly the capacity that is not consumed.
As for unmapped volumes, they can be identified from the Volumes tab. In this case, you just
have to apply a filter on the Mapped column to only display the unmapped volumes.
The procedure is quite the same for the unused volumes identification since it only consists
in applying a filter on the Time Since Last Activity column. Let's see how to create this filter.
Imagine that you want to know which volumes have not been used for the last 30 days.
You then have to: Create a filter
Specify that the no activity period is equal to 30 days
And click Enter to display the corresponding list.
You can now take the necessary actions and reclaim the unused space!
I hope this tutorial was helpful to you.
Thanks again for watching our tutorials and using the Sentry Software's solutions.