Storage Performance Management Cycle
Managing the performance of enterprise storage consists of four distinct processes that often touch multiple disciplines within an enterprise, such as the performance team, the storage team, the storage architecture/engineering team, and the capacity planning and replication teams.
Having a Storage Performance Management solution like IntelliMagic's that incorporates automation and deep storage performance intelligence will greatly impact all these areas. It is necessary to use SPM across all four of the processes in order to achieve the full service level and financial benefits. The following sections provide an overview of the value IntelliMagic adds in each of these four areas which include Watch, Find, Buy and Move.
Watch
The foundation of a mature SPM implementation is proactive monitoring of the storage environment with daily, automated visibility into the right metrics for your enterprise storage systems. This enables a site to move from reacting to performance problems to avoiding them.
IntelliMagic Vision provides this visibility by performing a deep health check of every enterprise storage systems every day. It correlates the performance measurements of your workloads to the capabilities of the hardware so that performance bottlenecks can be easily identified before they disrupt production applications. The IntelliMagic Vision daily dashboard view enables a daily risk assessment on the health of large, geographically dispersed storage environments in only a few minutes. The right performance metrics are computed for each level in the storage system. These show how the various hardware components are performing. Having the right metrics is also essential for successful Find, Buy, and Move processes. IntelliMagic Vision automatically stores the metrics in a historical database so that trend reports on your application workloads can be easily viewed over time and used for predictive modeling scenarios.
Find
Resolution speed and accuracy are essential when a problem occurs on a critical part of the IT infrastructure. The proper functioning of storage is too important to wait for external analysis or to attempt to resolve problems on the basis of assumptions.
IntelliMagic Vision plays a critical role in gaining the ability to quickly identify and understand the root cause(s) of any constraints, and determine whether workloads can be rebalanced or whether additional hardware is really required. The IntelliMagic Vision database allows the performance data to be viewed in every relevant dimension for quick problem isolation. Intelligence is also incorporated into the product to assist in recognizing root causes. IntelliMagic Direction can show the utilization percentage of all internal components of the storage system, like front-end ports and back-end adapters. The heat maps provided by IntelliMagic Balance will quickly and easily show which incremental moves of data will eliminate hot spots in the environment.
Move
Data placement on storage hardware has a significant effect on the throughput and hence lifespan of the hardware. IntelliMagic Balance is unique in its ability to create a placement plan that significantly
increases the useful lifespan of the storage system.
Balance is the key to storage hardware efficiency because peaks caused by uneven distribution artificially limit the capabilities. IntelliMagic Balance analyzes every volume's workload for a week's worth of data and calculates a layout such so that the key hardware resources, such as the back-end array groups, are all doing as close to the same amount of work as possible. The resulting data migration plan can be used with your existing migration tools when moving to new hardware. A migration plan can also be generated for moving to larger volume sizes without incurring the risk of creating new hot spots. The ‘best moves' feature of IntelliMagic Balance is the easiest way for sites to address hot spots in their existing hardware configurations and increase the overall throughput capacity of the hardware by moving only a small set of volumes within the existing hardware.
Buy
If the existing hardware is no longer sufficient for the required workload, the IntelliMagic suite provides the knowledge to optimally select and configure a hardware upgrade or replacement.
IntelliMagic Balance can be used in a hardware planning stage to assess the feasibility of various hard disk device types. Significant savings can be realized by configuring storage systems with larger drives, but these introduce additional performance risks. IntelliMagic Balance quantifies these risks and can create multi-tier solutions where for instance Solid State Drives are used for high access density data and Fibre or SATA drives are used for the remaining data. IntelliMagic Direction can be used to model a complete storage system configuration from all enterprise storage vendors. It predicts the response times and utilization levels of all components within the storage system. By showing the benefits of different hardware options you can select the most cost-effective configuration that meets your workload performance requirements.
