One of the cool things I get to do in the HP storage consulting business is show customers the potential savings they may profit from simply by moving across to an HP 3PAR storage array. This assessment nicknamed the Capacity Savings Assessment is backed by HP’s Get Thin Guarantee and can really show what the move to 3PAR can do for your business.
This assessment can help you evaluate your data utilisation rates and provide reports on capacity, power, cooling and even floor space savings.
This can introduce a range of benefits to your business such as smaller footprint, smaller electricity bill, less management overhead etc.
Here is what some pages from the sample report looks like:
So how does it do this? it scans the host’a filesystem and reports allocated vs used vs freespace. To report accurate potential thin savings, the environment must not be thin provisioned already (no point in thinning out an already thin environment right!)
Current support host sets are Windows (any flavour), Unix, Linux and VMware vSphere 4/5.
Key reporting includes Capacity Utilisation, Disk Space Usage, Summary of the 3PAR configuration and a comparison of a 3PAR configuration with the current environment.
From a VMware perspective, the newest release no longer uses VMware PowerCLI to obtain the information, instead it utilised vSphere’s native SDK and can scan NFS datastores.
To help justify a business case of what this means in $ value, consider the following page:
Now I ran this on my home lab, so the statistics aren’t staggering but I hope you get the point.
The aim here is to by going thin will mean less storage which can mean less power and less datacentre costs! which of course can mean cost savings.
So onto the technical stuff.
What network ports does it use?
Windows: port 135 (RCP/DCOM)
Linux: port 22 (SSH)
ESX: port 443 (HTTPS)
How much network traffic will there be?
Network traffic resulting from a capacity scan is marginal. Testing shows less than 4KB per scanned host.
What permissions does it require?
Windows: User account must have Read Security and Remote Enable permissions on WMI namespace root\cimv2
Linux/Unix: User Account must be enabled for SSH login and have permission to run the df and lshal commands.
ESX server: User account must have vCenter browse privilege.
Will it add overhead?
No, the discovery tool is a lightweight tool, the execution overhead is marginal, typically less than 5% CPU utilization.
Intrigued? Why not contact me and organise a free assessment on your storage and VMware environment. If you are not in my area, contact me anyway as we have ninja champions all over the world.
