Was just reading a response from Stephen Foskett to my last post on Storage Optimization and it made me think about alerting and diagnostics. How do you avoid the limit cases on systems to try to avoid problems and then to identify root cause on problems to avoid future cases.
I like to look at this from two aspects - performance and capacity management.
For the first Performance Advisor can be a great tool to help. It allows you to selectively choose from a large set of performance counters and the build thresholds or combination thresholds as needed. It also allows for good problem isolation later by allowing you reverse time and see former performance views of your storage system. You can then help isolate the problem with selective viewing of your data. For a good overview of the latest features see Raja's post on the NetApp Community http://communities.netapp.com/message/2874 . This will be a really interesting space to watch in the future as we look at add more proactive planning and predictive analysis to Perforamance Advisor.
As for capacity management - two products are there to help. The first is Provisioning Manager which I reviewed last time - the second which deserves a complete post to itself if NetApp Operations Manager. It provides space based reporting for primary, snapshot, reserve space allocations, shares, quotas, luns and helps you trend that space usage and report on it. You can use that for storage growth planning or also, if desired, for chargeback. It provides canned reports, custom reporting and also a recent addition was the export capability which allows you to feed your operational data into another reporting tool for more flexible analysis. We are also working on some very interesting capacity reporting in SANscreen which will provide full data hetrogeneous storage capacity planning ... more on that soon.
Hmmm... a few more follow on posts are needed on this topic - more soon.
The announcement undoubtedly raises some eyebrows. The elder Murtha is...
Posted by: | June 25, 2009 at 07:06 AM