STORAGE CAPACITY PLANNING
As it relates to IT organizations, capacity planning has traditionally been performed for the server environment which is designed to anticipate processing and memory requirements to support the business applications needed for an enterprise. Capacity planning for the storage environment is more complex, and oftentimes less scientific, because the information needed to make informed decisions is not in a readily usable form.
CHALLENGES IN EFFICIENT CAPACITY PLANNING
Most IT departments either over estimate their needs or make simplistic estimates, both of which result in either over spending or worse – large, unplanned purchases due to inaccurate forecasting. There are many aspects that need to be considered when developing a capacity plan for your storage environment, but many IT departments do not have the time or resources available to do this efficiently.
One element almost never considered is, “when has the array hit its performance limit.” Many clients only project storage usage and based on that projection they conclude no additional storage capacity is needed. However, when you factor in performance capacity, you may have completely different growth curves, which would result in a different set of budget decisions.
Some aspects to take into consideration:
Storage Usage Growth
Existing Organic Growth Trends
Planned Application Needs
Performance Capacity Needs
Availability Considerations
SO WHAT?
Why does this matter and what is the impact of not having this information? This matters a GREAT Deal. Clients in this situation create several unexpected problems.
Capacity Planning Made Easy
VSI is designed to collect and track storage data at all levels of the organization, so planning can be performed at of levels -including business unit or application, enterprise, data center, individual storage arrays, host clusters, individual servers. The capacity planning capabilities within VSI enable enterprises to: