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Identify Over-Provisioned SAN Infrastructure

Identifying Over-provisioned FC Ports for Maximum SAN Consolidation

In our work with dozens of large Global 1000 customers, we have consistently found that there is massive over-provisioning of fibre channel ports on nearly all SANs. Typical average SAN port utilization rates are under 10%.  Below is an example, which shows the most utilized ports on two storage arrays on a F500 company’s SAN.

This points to a significant opportunity for savings around SAN port consolidation and avoiding unnecessary future SAN equipment purchases.  Our most successful customers have saved $100K to $300K per array.

VirtualWisdom helps you to reclaim underutilized SAN ports in order to save on expensive core switch ports, storage ports and related cables, SFPs etc. Real-time proactive monitoring and alerting enables high consolidation rates without impacting performance as demands change.  And VirtualWisdom can alert you to changes in demand and performance long before users are impacted. Latency and throughput per port reports allow your team to discover optimizations that balance utilization and increase consolidation.

 

Case Study

  • Large Financial Services Company | Virtual Instruments helped this leading financial services firm  uncover unevenly provisioned links, to help avoid unnecessary purchases of storage array ports.

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Whitepapers

  • SAN Utilization Best Practices | November 2009 | In most corporate data centers, 2Gb and 4Gb Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs) links are over-provisioned by a factor of 5x or more, on average. This is due to a lack of visibility into actual SAN performance and utilization data, which has led to massive hardware link over-provisioning in an attempt to avoid performance issues, to maximize availability, and to simply avoid risk. Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom solution enables IT to optimize existing 2Gb/4Gb SAN infrastructure so it can provide consistent performance and reliability to support virtualized applications and internal cloud computing operations.

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