Datacore has announced a new SANsymphony option, SANmaestro, which correlates SAN activity to applications by charting I/O workloads - both bandwidth and throughput, capacity consumption, physical ports and access frequency over time. It does so without loading any agents on the application servers. Instead, the software gleans storage-related performance and utilisation insight from collectors running on each SANsymphony node. It then aggregates measurements and plots them over specified intervals for those SANsymphony accounts that need to:
- Rely on historical trends for capacity planning
- Shed light on peak loading periods
- Capture actual usage as input to billing and charge-back tools.
SANmaestro gathers SAN-wide instrumentation provided by SANsymphony in real-time, then aggregates and charts workloads, capacity utilisation and access frequency, among other parameters. Such information can be used to tune the storage facility to better respond to requests.
Arun Taneja, of the
Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting firm, said of SANmaestro, "It can gauge which applications are the most resource hungry, then factor these figures into its billing, charge-back, capacity planning, and budget justification. An export facility makes it simple to further process results in Excel, SAS, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server and other familiar packages already used for those purposes."
The avoidance of host agents pre-empts security problems on the application servers. It also means that SANmaestro can only measure the application server information coming up the network pipes. It cannot look into the actual application servers to glean further information.
The pricing for the SANmaestro Monitoring Component, available now, starts at $15,000 per storage pool. Site-specific customisation is also available.
