The dashboard is a visual display of the important information required to analyze the overall capacity utilization and health of your storage system. It has visual indicators such as total usable capacity, current utilization, a data protection summary, and monitoring alerts.
Analyzing data shown in alert tiles
The alert tiles collectively present the health of the storage system environment. With a quick view, you can verify that your storage environment is healthy if you see no alerts on the alert tiles. No alerts indicates that there are no capacity or hardware issues in the environment, no failed jobs in the last 24 hours, and that the data protection is working without any issues.
If there are any alerts, you can drill down to the relevant alert window to investigate the cause. Ops Center Administrator has alerts for capacity utilization, hardware, data protection, and jobs status for block storage.
Analyzing data in the information gauge
The information gauge gives a visual indication of the total capacity of all storage systems managed by Ops Center Administrator.
Thin Used indicates the sum of all capacity that is currently used. If the usage is around 70-80% of the total capacity, you might receive capacity alerts based on the thresholds set by your storage administrator for block storage. The default thresholds are 70% and 80% and can be changed during pool creation.
The Total Allocated value representing the sum of the capacities of all pools in the system must be close to 100% capacity. This indicates that you are utilizing your entire parity group capacities for block storage and drive capacities for software-defined storage systems by allocating them to pools. If the Thin Used value nears the Total Allocated value then you might run out of pool capacity soon. In this case, consider expanding the pool to accommodate more capacity.
If you notice that the Total Allocated and the Thin Used values are approaching the total capacity, you might be running out of disk capacity on one or more storage systems and might need to add disk space to increase storage capacity. Before adding disk space, consider the following steps:
- Review the information gauge for each storage system to identify which one needs additional capacity.
- Check for unused disks in each storage system to determine if any raw unused capacity is available for parity group creation in block storage and for storage pool expansion in software-defined storage systems.
Capacity subscription beyond the total available capacity must not be an issue as long as your thin capacity utilization remains well within the total capacity.
Analyzing data protection metrics
The balance of your protected primary volumes and secondary volumes depends on the number of copies you chose to maintain and on the type of the data protection technology used. If you set aside more volumes for data protection, the overall usable capacity might be affected. However, if you have a large amount of unprotected data, you should consider data protection options.
Tier management
As parity groups are created, the various disk types become categorized into tiers. The tiers and corresponding disk types are as follows for block storage.
| Tier | Disk type |
|---|---|
| Diamond | SCM NVMe |
| Platinum |
FMD, FMD DC2, SSD, SSD(RI), FMD HDE, SSD NVMe, and SSD(QLC) |
| Gold | SAS 15 k |
| Silver | SAS 10 k |
| Bronze | SAS 7.2 k |
The Tier Management window displays the tier definitions. You can edit the tier names (Diamond, Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, External, and SDS).
Access the Tier Management window by clicking the Settings tab and selecting Tier Management.