Increase ROI on your IT Infrastructure with Storage Optimization and Performance Analysis
Modern business is characterized by demand for enormous business speed and agility, as well as heightened expectations from customers, partner, and employees. To keep up, businesses need to get more innovative and their data centers – faster and more flexible. Unfortunately, the storage infrastructure can limit a business organization’s agility and increase IT spend. So it is important to plan ways to increase ROI.
Poor Performance in the Storage Infrastructure is a significant reason for increased IT spend. Every piece of information has to be stored in a data storage device in some form or the other. If there is high latency in the storage network, i.e., applications are waiting for data to be provided by storage devices, this can have a severe impact on the performance of critical applications in the enterprise. This generally triggers knee-jerk upgrades and costly investments by the Enterprise, all of which increases the IT spend.
The mandate for the IT Division is better alignment with business requirements so that new applications and services can be introduced, along with creating a platform for future scalability. The IT Infrastructure needs to get simpler, more flexible, more efficient and less expensive to operate. Only then can the organization become truly agile and excel.
None of this would be possible without Performance Analysis.
Performance Analysis is not just desirable, but indispensable
Performance Analysis or its more practical form of implementation – Performance As A Service™ provides a specialist approach to Performance inclusive Capacity planning. Leading niche players like Interscape will pro-actively assess the multi-vendor storage infrastructure for performance bottlenecks and storage capacity utilizations, on a regular basis, and provide detailed resource utilization recommendations.
Performance Analysis tracks the response times of your Storage Area Network and Storage Arrays which directly impact your applications and, business tasks that are critical to your organization. Till date, measuring performance had been a reactive and fire-fighting on daily basis approach, rather than a pro-active approach to properly base-lining your applications IO profile using key performance metrics such as IOPS, KBPS, Service Times, IO queues and hardware utilizations. Pro-active baselines of Application IO profiles allow you to set intelligent performance thresholds in the operational environments for real-time monitoring.
Performance As a Service™ then becomes the most attractive option as it can help organizations arrive at realistic performance SLAs based on analysis of actual IO requirements.
Till date, storage networks have been using a mechanism called as ‘Storage tiering’ to optimize the SAN’s performance. As per this, the highest tier or highest priority data is stored on the fastest storage arrays and disks. This results in significant under-utilization of the most expensive storage. A better approach would be ‘Performance tiering’.
Performance tiering measures real-time application latency, or the amount of time applications wait for the storage system to provide data. By compiling the transaction times and analyzing them, benchmarks can be established, revealing how fast data is being delivered to the most critical applications. It can then be further determined if the storage subsystems are in fact slowing the applications down, or in contrast, they are running below rated speed due to bottlenecks elsewhere in the storage infrastructure.
Performance tiering provides the data needed to provision storage tiers accurately, reducing wastage or under-utilization. It also enables storage managers to assign new data sets to an appropriate tier confidently, even for the most critical applications.
Another area within Performance Analysis is Storage Performance and Capacity Assessment (SPCA). Performance As A Service™ PAAS is focused on storage performance. It provides technical analysis of capacity utilizations in terms of storage and detailed storage array performance utilizations in terms of IOPS and %utilized. It can also provide financial analysis in terms of cost/GB, IOPS/GB and other critical metrics. Recommendations for IT storage strategies are also made as issues are found with the storage architecture in terms of scalability and capacity utilizations. This results in significant cost savings, high uptime, and a scalable infrastructure that is operationally efficient.
What does Performance Analysis involve?
Performance As A Service™ (PAAS) leverages the Perfonics™ tool that provides Interscape Technologies’ extensive services in the areas of capacity planning and storage optimization. Perfonics™ leverages existing toolset data installed on customer site without installing any agents or appliances in the existing infrastructure. All analysis is done on offsite manner.
- Perfonics looks at the IO profiles of various applications in the back-end storage arrays, and recommends the most optimum type of storage, RAID Levels and hence – efficient use of infrastructure.
- Perfonics pro-actively analyzes hundreds of storage performance metrics in the enterprise-class storage infrastructure to determine any performance bottlenecks.
- Hardware resource utilization is examined to see how much of capacity is available in the existing infrastructure and recommend suitable purchases.
- Perfonics also creates a whole lot of Performance Baselines for storage arrays and servers (AIX, Linux, Solaris, HP/Ux & Windows)
- Perfonics analyzes storage from a Green Technology perspective to see how efficient the current storage infrastructure is. This is done by looking at cost/GB, IOPS/GB, Power consumed, heating/cooling etc.
A comprehensive report and presentation is made which reviews the key points of the findings and recommendations for the custom storage assessment. This report will contain recommendations and best practices, for the customer to understand the current infrastructure, design, and implement beneficial changes to the storage environment. This helps improve performance and capacity utilizations based on best practices. There is also a high-level dashboard view for senior management and a detailed view for the technical staff. The assessment can be one-time, monthly, quarterly, or annual trending, as desired. These technical and architectural recommendations will be the foundation for a financial return on investment.
How does Performance Analysis increase ROI on your IT Infrastructure?
Performance Analysis and Storage Optimization together with Capacity Assessment is a powerful combination that allows IT departments to migrate toward a more agile and proactive organization that can guarantee better and consistent Quality of Service (QoS) by the organizations delivery to the business, reduce costs, improve IT efficiency and shift the focus away from reactive firefighting and towards innovating for the business. Having the capacity utilizations, performance profiles and hardware resource utilizations in a single view provides the information you need to make the right business and technical decisions.
This helps increase resource utilization, leverage existing investments, reduce energy costs and increase your data center capacity multifold.
Benefits of Performance Analysis:
- Identify and address current storage performance problems.
- Determine if current storage type is most effective for applications and hosts
- Provide guidance in creating service level agreements (SLAs) within organization by looking at historical service times at set percentile level
- Determine success of current storage environment in meeting required performance levels
- Optimize data access times and identify solution scalability needs
- Summarize current storage hardware and software costs from IOPS/GB perspective
- Identify potential solution implementation costs, including: Cost-replacement modeling from current state to future state recommendations
- Return on Investment (ROI) modeling for recommended changes
- Reduced operating expenses for electricity, facility space, and IT labor
- Reduced capital expenses (CapEx) on storage and server infrastructure
Benefits of Storage Optimization & Capacity Assessment:
- Right-Tiering and Right-Sizing by knowing all critical metrics around your storage
- Create a Performance Inclusive Capacity Planning Process (based on HW resource utilizations).
- Find orphan storage that can be reclaimed for re-use.
- Determine your real consumption rates and over-subscription rates and their trends for thin-provisioned storage
- Create/Enhance the current storage reclamation process to reclaim whitespaces
- Size storage needs and validate new storage/SAN purchases.
- Identify performance bottlenecks, problem areas or over/under utilization.
- Prioritize storage infrastructure issues and remedies.
- Understand data usage and protection requirements for Disaster Recovery and analyze data replication status host by host
- Fully understand root causes of storage and data protection gaps.
- Increased data security – reduce potential risks caused by inadequate data retention, data security or data integrity
- Increased operational efficiency – optimize solution performance by assessing the actual technical and financial aspects of the current storage environment
- Reduced costs – reduce current and long-term IT and business costs by addressing areas of inefficient data storage