VirtualInstruments

Optimize Storage Tiering Through Storage Performance Analysis

Many organizations hesitate to provision their business critical applications on tier 2 storage or SATA drives, for fear that performance won’t meet requirements. Or, their ILM and HSM projects stall because there’s no way to know how tiering will impact users. Picking the right storage tier can be risky, because most IT shops do not have the right instrumentation to measure the performance impact of tiering.

With VirtualWisdom^®, IT organizations have the latency data and other information needed to properly plan and optimize the storage environment so that lower cost tier 2 storage or SATA drives can provide tier I performance.  Organizations that combine sophisticated storage planning with Virtual Instrument’s real-time alerting capabilities can prevent user impact as demands change, enabling them to realize huge CAPEX improvements. The organization can use tier 2 or tier 3 storage for all applications except those that actually demand tier 1 attributes, such as enterprise-class replication. When the ILM decision is based on performance, VirtualWisdom offers the real-time analysis that proves the effect of the storage on application response time. Using less expensive storage can result in $5K – 20K+ per terabyte savings.

How VirtualWisdom is different

In the days of direct-attached storage, when the I/O performance bottleneck was disk transfer rate, existing storage array tools would be sufficient to determine where to place data for an optimum balance of performance and costs.  But today, in the world of shared storage, it’s much too simplistic to look just at the difference in external transfer rate between a Fibre Channel disk and a SATA disk.  In today’s SAN, you are guaranteed to have bottlenecks somewhere else.  Congestion in the fabric can cause response time to be 100 times (or more) slower.  Not having HBA queue depths set properly can have a factor of 10 impact on response time.  Errors on the links can cause sporadic disturbances that can increase application response by 3,000 times.  Virtual Instruments gives you the complete picture, not just the storage system reading.

When you deploy tier 2 storage, typically based on SATA drives and a RAID 5 configuration, you will also see dramatic benefits from reductions in floor space, cooling and power consumption.  When compared to expensive tier 1 storage arrays, typically configured in a RAID10 configuration, all of the core SAN environmental costs are improved by over 50% as SATA drives are larger and use far less power and cooling per TB of data.  Additional significant savings can be realized in decreased floor space, often helping to postpone datacenter build-outs as SATA drives are typically larger than FC drives by a factor of 4 or more, leading to a much lower PB per floor tile. Intelligent storage tiering based on actual performance data helps you dramatically reduce both capital and operating expenses.

	Dashboard Before-After Comparison
	Before Real-time Dashboard  demonstrates response times for each tier of shared storage. You can confidently move new applications to secondary tiers		After Dashboard helps ensure that even with greatly expanded use of secondary tiers, response times are well within expected SLAs. In addition to the real-time Dashboard, you can run trend reports to show historical response times