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Prevent Your Next Storage Meltdown
Users click: no response ... hourglass cursors ... applications grind to a halt ... operations slow to a crawl ... your phone begins to ring ... urgent IMs pop up on your screen ... angry emails begin to pour in ... your pager goes off at 3 a.m. When your critical enterprise storage system melts down, it occurs suddenly, without warning; and it is costly. 
ORtera prevents storage meltdowns; no other application can provide you the protection ORtera does. ORtera is the only application that will show you way ahead of time how unevenly balanced your workload is among the devices you believe are pooled to share the load evenly. In addition, only ORtera warns you when your configuration is close to saturation at the physical-device level of your storage stack when things look good at the filesystem level. You will be surprised by what ORtera reveals to you. ORtera also shows you which data files should be moved and collocated to spread the load evenly and homogeneously, better utilizing your resources, increasing headroom and preventing meltdown. You will realize increased configuration longevity and return on investment by the efficient use of resources made possible by ORtera. To see how, check out the real-life examples here. Data Warehouse Meltdown Case In this real-world example, a data warehouse configured in the absence of ORtera has been structured to use a logical volume consisting of two physical devices. Although response time seemed slow from the users' perspective, legacy SRM tools gave no indication of the underlying cause. Upon installation of ORtera, it alerted the system administrator that response time is indeed unacceptable: 
Click on the image to enlarge it
Moreover, ORtera Heuristics indicated that one cause is data that is not balanced between the physical devices: 
Opening the ORtera Workload -> I/O Per Resource tab for the physical device level revealed what is very difficult to detect without ORtera, namely that I/O is hitting one of the physical devices supporting the logical volume much more intensely than the other physical device supporting the same logical volume: 
ORtera detects the dependencies between all the storage system layers; therefore, ORtera is uniquely able to illuminate this condition. The load is supposed to be spread evenly over the physical devices supporting the same logical device, so when one is hit much harder than another, there is clearly a configuration problem. Other tools lack knowledge of the relationships between logical and physical devices, and they are unable to detect this type of misconfiguration. As activity on this data warehouse increases, the busy device is subject to meltdown, which would come suddenly and unexpectedly. ORtera provided advance warning of this condition, and recommended configuration changes to Low Capability Headroom Points to a Meltdown in Progress In this case example, ORtera Heuristics reveals low resource capability headroom for this filesystem: 
Heuristics at the filesystem level reveal that some files are much busier than other files, and are thus good candidates to be moved to another filesystem. This is a very common scenario: 
A look into the Workload > I/O Per Resource tab shows the list of files, which may be sorted by Operations, Data, or Time consumed, to reveal the wide disparity between how the files in this filesystem are being used: 
ORtera prevents storage meltdowns as no other application can. ORtera is the only application that will show you how uneven your workload is among the devices that otherwise appear to be pooled to share the load evenly. Only ORtera warns you when your configuration is close to saturation at the physical-device level of your storage stack when things look good at the filesystem level. ORtera also shows you which data files should be moved and collocated to spread the load evenly and homogeneously, better utilizing your resources, increasing headroom, and preventing meltdown. You will realize increased configuration longevity and ROI by the efficient use of resources made possible by ORtera.
Summary Report and Heuristics ORtera Summary Report delivers printer-ready documentation for the system run-book or other logs. It provides an audit trail of baseline and changes in performance for external documentation and sharing with supervisors or customers. 
In this example, we have looked at just a few of the performance-degrading conditions can ORtera detect. ORtera Heuristics diagnoses and guides you in correction of 24 performance-degrading conditions:
Conclusion With ORtera, in minutes you have diagnosed your storage bottlenecks and the causes of low resource headroom on your system, making the system responsive for users, and preventing a costly sudden meltdown. In addition, you now have a full understanding of the capabilities and constraints of your storage system, and you know it is performing at its best. ORtera makes your storage configuration process more effective, faster, cheaper, and fun:
To start your free 1-week trial of ORtera, click here. Free, fun demo version, works on any OS, no servers necessary, available here. |
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©2005 ORtera Inc.| |