THREE MINUTES TO INSIGHTS: Storage Space Fragmentation

Transcript: 

In this demo, you are going to learn how Visual One can help you quickly identify fragmentation in your storage environment.

Despite advances in storage technology, fragmentation continues to be a significant problem for storage administrators.  Oftentimes, administrators think they have sufficient Free Space to meet their users’ needs, only to find out after it’s too late that the available space is too fragmented to be usable.

In today’s example, a storage administrator needs to provision 15TB of storage for a new worker safety application.  The administrator has already determined that storage will be provisioned from the Shared File storage array. Using Visual One’s drill down capability, she can easily analyze the array’s Free Space to determine how it is distributed. This particular array formats its storage into groups of disks called Aggregates. And for this application, the storage administrator needs to allocate all 15TB of storage from a single Aggregate.

Visual One’s Fragmentation Report clearly shows Free Space by Aggregate, as well as the type of storage in each Aggregate – in this case, Fiber Channel, SATA, SAS, and SSD.  Based on the performance requirements for this application, storage needs to be allocated from an Aggregate that is made up of Fiber Channel Disk Drives.  The Visual One report shows that the largest available Fiber Channel free space is approximately 7.7TB, indicating that additional Fiber Channel storage will need to be purchased to fulfill the requirements of the new application.

In less than 3 minutes, Visual One gave this customer the information she needs to confirm that storage capacity needs to be increased, giving her time to order additional storage and avoid impacting the deployment schedule of the new worker safety application.