Storage Capacity Planning Capability Model – What Level Is Your Company?

Ever wonder how your storage capacity planning process compares to “best-in-class”? A storage capacity planning capability model provides the industry with a consistent model to define and communicate where your storage capacity planning processes are now and provides a target for what you would like your processes to be in the future. The four stages of the storage capacity planning capability model are summarized below:

1. Estimation Planning
In this stage, the IT organization employs no formal storage capacity planning process. Based on requests from application owners, IT administrators allocate LUNs from existing inventory. IT purchases additional inventory in advance of its educated guess on when existing inventory will run out. To determine how much storage to purchase, IT relies on the business unit or application owners, their “gut instinct”, or they base their decisions on what was bought last year, last quarter, or last month. At this stage, companies typically exhibit frequent out-of-storage situations and very high over-provisioning, resulting in 30% - 40% utilization.

2. Resource Side Planning
At this stage, IT employs semi-automated collection of storage subsystem information. By trending out the inventory of storage that is usable by applications, IT will develop an estimated date when usable storage will run out. Often storage is purchased quarterly and the amount purchased is based on the historical growth rates of allocated storage. IT has little idea of how much of the allocated LUNs are actually being used and at what rate they are being consumed by applications. Therefore IT has no way of assessing if the incoming storage requests are too early, too late, or right on time. As a result, out-of-storage situations still occur as does significant over-provisioning, resulting in a 35% - 45% utilization rate.

3. Integrated Application Side / Resource Side Planning
The Integrated Application Side / Resource Side Planning stage first analyzes the application demand side consumption to understand application host volume baseline utilization and future projections to determine when, where, and what type of storage is needed. The process then correlates application demand analysis with the resource supply inventory, which allows storage administrators to develop a storage capacity plan based on how the current subsystems’ inventories need to be allocated and grown to efficiently meet the application consumption demand.

The strength of this stage is that it can successfully answer the five fundamental questions for an efficient storage capacity planning process:

1. When additional storage is needed
2. How much storage is required
3. Where storage is needed
4. What type of storage is appropriate
5. Where will the additional storage come from

With integrated application side / resource side planning, companies eliminate out-of-storage emergencies and typically achieve utilization rates in the 70% - 80% range.

4. Business Plan / Resource Side Planning
The Business Plan / Resource Side Planning stage is exactly like the Application Side / Resource Side stage with one exception. Instead of performing demand forecasting from historical storage consumption trends, storage demand forecasting is based on Key Business Metrics (KBMs) from the company’s business plan.

For more information on the Storage Capacity Planning Capability Model, download the complete white paper.

Storage Tips

This edition’s storage tips come from Brad O’Neill of the Taneja Group.  Brad outlines the steps every storage IT organization should follow to implement a good storage capacity planning process.

Step 1: Properly identify all storage resources. This entails getting accurate data repository views into all available storage resources, not merely mission critical resources or capacities for which tools happen to be available.

Step 2: Measure specific storage growth rates as they relate to the applications they store. This requires the actual monitoring and measurement of thousands to tens of thousands of specific storage resources based on detailed projections of their usage and future growth, not merely gross estimations or “array headcounts” based on current capacity.

Step 3: Develop a plan based on capacity metrics. Once all resources have been accounted for and growth rates captured in the context of usage, the planning portion enters the picture. A team should develop detailed procurement and deployment steps based on these metrics, not merely use capacity measurements as a “guideline”, as is often the case today.

These three steps constitute the most basic parameters of the capacity planning discipline. They are so fundamental that we believe every end user should make them explicit in their storage practice.

In The News

February 7, 2006
Storage Horizon wins Silver in Storage magazine’s Product of the Year 2005
By: Editors of SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine

February 6, 2006
Since you asked…
Opinion by Steve Duplessie ESG, Computerworld

December 13, 2005
Software fills forecasting gap in SRM
By Kevin Komiega, InfoStor

December 1, 2005
Survey highlights capacity planning problems
By Jo Maitland, SearchStorage.com

November 10, 2005
Do Windows admins lack storage management products
By Joan Goodchild, SearchWin2000

October 3rd, 2005
Storage start-up keeps tabs on capacity needs
By Deni Connor, Network World

MonoSphere Employee Spotlight – Reece Joyner, Manager of Quality Assurance

“As for as the customer having a quality experience with Storage Horizon, the buck stops here,” said Reece Joyner, Manager of Quality Assurance at MonoSphere Inc.  “If the software doesn’t work as expected, the customer will not get the value that they paid for.  Our team is here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”  Reece heads the Quality Assurance team that is dedicated to ensuring that customers receive quality software.  “One of the biggest challenges of the team is to account for the many different customer environments in our installed base, which means testing the different combinations of software and hardware versions.”  Reece and his team challenge each other to see who can find a way to break things and then help development fix them afterward.  “When we run out of our bag of tricks, we know the software is ready to ship”.  Reece has a large bag of tricks to pull from; he has been in QA for 10 years and has earned a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois.

When he is not testing the industry’s leading storage capacity planning software, Reece enjoys wine tasting, motorcycle riding, bodybuilding, and photography.  “Luckily the software that enters QA is in pretty good shape, or I’d have no free time at all,” smiles Reece as he pulls on his helmet and rides his motorcycle out of the company parking lot.