By: Bekah Suttner, Blue Medora
A common error in today’s data landscape is the over-utilization of resources. Storage systems are pushed to the limits of performance, and end users have become frustrated by a lack of productivity caused by slow storage. Using the analytics processes in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), administrators can gain detailed insight into the present health and future requirements of the storage environments.
Figure 1 – The stress on our NetApp volume
Let’s look at how the analytics engine in vROps can be used to anticipate future storage expansion needs. Our example will use a NetApp volume and Blue Medora’s Management Pack for NetApp Storage to view our NetApp storage environment in vROps.
Once we have navigated to our NetApp volume, the first data set we will analyze is stress. In the Stress tab, we see that there is a Stress Zone in the stress breakdown table. The stress zone indicates the capacity at which our volume will become stressed. Figure 1, above, indicates that our volume will become stressed if it reaches a capacity above 70%.
We can identify if we are near our volume’s stress point in the Capacity Remaining tab. This tab indicates the capacity remaining before the volume becomes stressed, rather than the remaining capacity of the volume’s total capacity.
Figure 2 – Capacity remaining for our NetApp volume
As we see in Figure 2, our volume has 60.23% capacity remaining before it becomes stressed. By viewing capacity remaining, we can see which volumes have plenty of space left and which volumes should be expanded or have resources re-allocated.
While capacity remaining displays how much space we have left on our volume, it is hard to tell how quickly our remaining capacity will be used. If we are writing data slowly, it may take years to fill the volume, but if we are writing large amounts of data, it could be necessary to expand the volume in just a few months. With the Time Remaining tab, we can anticipate our future storage expansion needs and prepare for them ahead of time.
Figure 3 – The time remaining before we need to buy more storage for our NetApp volume
In the Time Remaining tab, vROps analyzes the trend of data being written to our NetApp volume. In the case of Figure 3, data is being added at a steady pace, causing vROps to predict that our volume will move past its stress level in 108 days if we do not expand our storage.
By using vROps analytics like stress, capacity remaining, and time remaining, we can discover storage expansion needs before our storage becomes full. In doing so, we are able to eliminate setbacks caused by utilization of storage and increase productivity by preventing stress on storage.
To learn more about the predictive analytics of vRealize Operations, visit the product page. For more information on the Management Pack for NetApp Storage, visit the product page on Blue Medora’s website.
