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ORtera Atlas Features Overview

ORtera's purpose is to make your storage configuration process more effective, faster, cheaper, and fun for you.

Lower Response Time
Improve Performance Reliability
Increase Throughput Capability
Increase Headroom
Completely understand your storage performance limits and capabilities
Know your performance is the best it can be

ORtera enables you to accelerate your storage performance by quickly identifying performance-degrading conditions, and recommending configuration changes. Before ORtera, these conditions were extremely difficult or impossible to diagnose; but their degradation of storage performance is severe. ORtera walks you through the analysis to troubleshoot storage performance in a few easy steps.

On this page, screenshots of the ORtera GUI (Compass) show you ORtera key features, and how ORtera helps you detect and correct storage performance issues. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

For specific use-case examples, with screenshots, see Reconfiguration for Performance Using ORtera Heuristics, and Configuration Design Acceptance (QA).

Application and Storage Resource Dependency Discovery

The ORtera Atlas HyperDiscovery^TM process relieves you from the complex analysis needed to figure out the relationships between an application's processes, the storage resources they use, and the dependencies between the resources.

ORtera finds all files and devices a process has open, matches them to storage resources of different types (filesystems, logical and physical devices), and shows you the dependencies between the process and its storage resources and between the layers of the storage system as tree nodes in the left pane of the GUI.

Automatic and Selective Analysis

Once installed and started, ORtera automatically discovers your processes and storage resources, and runs a 3-minute monitoring session on the 10 busiest processes (applications) and the filesystems they use. This analysis gives you an initial view of how your storage system is used.

You can also select processes and filesystems of special interest and monitor them at any time. In the Processes and Filesystems tabs, you select the processes and filesystems for performance troubleshooting, and choose a monitoring period length (perhaps 10 minutes) for ORtera to perform its analysis and diagnosis.

Performance-Degrading Conditions Detection

ORtera uses patented models and algorithms based on discrete, empirical I/O events at each level of the storage-system hierarchy to detect many performance degrading conditions, including:

Slow response times,
Low resource capability headroom (how close you are to a meltdown),
Fragmentation between storage-system layers,
Unbalanced workload, including I/O size, type, number of accesses, and other metrics, degrading performance.

The color of the nodes representing storage resources indicates whether ORtera has found suboptimal performance configurations for the subject process or storage resources. Green nodes indicate no suboptimal conditions, yellow nodes indicate minor issues, and red nodes indicate conditions severely constraining or threatening your storage performance.

The ORtera Heuristics messages describe suboptimal conditions, the relevant metrics associated with those conditions (with details available on the other tabs), and provide recommendations for correcting those conditions, all in plain English.

ORtera Heuristics diagnoses and guides you in correction of 24 performance-degrading conditions:

High Sustained Arrival Rate High Average Arrival Rate

Filesystem Space Fragmentation RAID I/O Fragmentation

Filesystem I/O Fragmentation Sequential I/O Not Coalesced

Excessive Read Ahead Unbalanced File I/O Operations

Unbalanced File Data Unbalanced File Response Times

Unbalanced Device I/O Operations Unbalanced Device Data

Unbalanced Device Response Times Marginal Response Times

Unacceptable Response Times High Logical Device Peak Load

High Physical Device Peak Load Large I/O Size Variations

Unbalanced Partition Extremely Large I/O

Low Resource Capability Headroom CPU Overload

Over-Allocation of Physical Resources Unused Physical Resources

Easy Access to Detailed Descriptions and Advice

Clicking the "?" next to the heuristic description opens a window to the corresponding User Guide section.

The User Guide gives you both a more detailed description of the condition and advice about what configuration changes you can make to resolve the issue.

Complete Workload Descriptions

The Workload tab for a storage resource contains detailed metrics describing the workload at the selected level, while the Performance tab describes how the workload performs. Some of this information (I/O size distribution and I/O type composition) is available both numerically and as charts.

This detailed information shows you exactly what I/O requests are issued and gives you a deeper understanding of the conditions detected by ORtera Heuristics.

You find a summary of both workload and performance metrics in the Properties tab.

I/O Transformation Visualization

Transformations between filesystem levels are likely causes of degraded storage performance; therefore, it is important to compare metrics and analysis between layers of the storage stack.

Here we compare the load levels between the filesystem, logical devices, and physical devices in this process' storage stack.

Here we compare the I/O type composition between the filesystem, logical devices, and physical devices, both numerically and graphically.

Summary Reports for Documentation of Storage Configuration Performance

The 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.

Export and Import Workload Data as XML Files

You can export and import analysis data in XML format for comparison, sharing, progress tracking, and use in other applications. To try this out, you can download and install our free ORtera demo, and import the following XML files:

If your browser shows you the file instead of letting you download it, right-click on the link and choose "Save Link As" to download the file.

By automating your storage configuration process, ORtera helps you to make it more effective, faster, cheaper, and fun. Within minutes of installing and starting ORtera, you will have powerful vision into your storage stack, with guidance to fix bottlenecks and prevent sudden, costly meltdown. Click here to license ORtera, or here for your free 1-week trial, or here for a free demo version that works on any OS.