11.0 HP StoreVirtual Storage User Guide (AX696-96275, December 2013)

17 Monitoring performance
The Performance Monitor provides performance statistics for iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and storage
system I/Os to help you and HP support and engineering staff understand the load that the SAN
is servicing.
The Performance Monitor presents real-time performance data in both tabular and graphical form
as an integrated feature in the CMC. The CMC can also log the data for short periods of time
(hours or days) to get a longer view of activity. The data is also available via SNMP, so you can
integrate with your current environment or archive the data for capacity planning. See “Configuring
SNMP” (page 92).
As a real-time performance monitor, this feature helps you understand the current load on the SAN
to provide additional data to support decisions on issues such as the following:
• Configuration options (Would network bonding help me?)
• Capacity expansion (Should I add more storage systems?)
• Data placement (Should this volume be on my SATA or SAS cluster?)
The performance data does not directly provide answers, but lets you analyze what is happening,
and provides support for these types of decisions.
These performance statistics are available on a cluster, volume, and storage system basis, letting
you look at the workload on a specific volume and providing data like throughput, average I/O
size, read/write mix, and number of outstanding I/Os. Having this data helps you better understand
what performance you should expect in a given configuration. Storage system performance data
will allow you to easily isolate, for example, a specific storage system with higher latencies than
the other storage systems in the cluster.
Adaptive Optimization
Adaptive Optimization allows you to accelerate variable application workloads by utilizing different
tiers of storage for a single volume. These tiers exist within storage systems with more than one
drive type (i.e. the HP StoreVirtual VSA with SSDs and HDDs) in a cluster. Application data on
volumes is automatically shifted between these storage tiers according to access patterns. For best
results when using this sub-volume auto-tiering feature, each storage system in the cluster has the
same storage and tiering configuration (same capacity, same drive technology and RAID sets).
Adaptive Optimization performance information is displayed in a separate category under the
Performance Monitor. Adaptive Optimization statistics are available on volume/snapshot and
storage system level.
Prerequisites
• You must have a cluster with one or more storage systems and one or more volumes connected
via iSCSI or Fibre Channel.
• A server must be accessing a volume to read data, write data, or both.
• To use Adaptive Optimization, one or more storage systems that are Adaptive
Optimization-capable must be added to a cluster, and volumes must be created with Adaptive
Optimization permitted, which is the default setting. See “Working with clusters” (page 132)
and “Using volumes” (page 155).
Introduction to using performance information
The Performance Monitor can monitor dozens of statistics related to each cluster. For clusters and
volumes that are using Adaptive Optimization, performance monitoring adds statistics about the
activity and data use for the tiers of storage.
212 Monitoring performance