Capacity Planning is the art and science of predicting the future requirements for your infrastructure, and arranging that sufficient capacity and throughput potential is available for all applications to have uninterrupted service at all times.

When you think about storage capacity planning, there are actually two types of capacity you need to look at:

  1. Space capacity – how many TBs of data need to be supported.
    Space capacity utilization used to be fairly easy to track, but with new concepts like thin provisioning, complexity has increased and it has become more important to manage closely. Space capacity utilization is no longer simply the amount of the empty space available on the physical drives.
  2. Performance capacity – how much activity needs to be supported.
    Tracking performance capacity is not easy either. This is because the performance requirements for your applications vary widely over different intervals of time, and because there are various components inside the infrastructure that contribute to performance capacity, and visibility into these components is difficult. Consequently, the level of utilization or efficiency of performance capacity for the storage infrastructure is hard to track for most sites beacuse of this lack of visibility.

The more knowledge you have about the exact requirements of your applications, the easier and cheaper your hardware purchases will be. If you have to rely mainly on guess work, you will typically spend way more money – and not necessarily on the best configuration for your applications!

The IntelliMagic products solve the ‘visibility’ problem and allow you to do accurate performance capacity planning for your entire z/OS or SAN infrastructure, saving money while protecting against risks:

  • IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS

    IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS has support for z/OS Systemsz/OS Disk, and z/OS Virtual Tape, with extensive capabilities for capacity planning and tracking for Replication and for crucial z/OS resources such as Workload Manager (WLM) and Coupling Facilities.

    IntelliMagic also offers services to identify the latent performance capacity of your z/OS attached disk hardware that is caused by an imbalance of workloads. Very often, there is at least 30% of performance capacity of your storage systems that can be added to your available performance capacity by rebalancing the workloads across multiple storage systems through some simple logical volume or storage pool moves. This can provide immediate relief to performance stressed storage systems, and will extend the life of the storage hardware. IntelliMagic also helps in purchases, since it can intelligently compute the optimal amount of each drive technology in an automatic tiering environment with a combination of Flash, Fibre, and SATA drives.

  • IntelliMagic Vision for SAN

    IntelliMagic Vision for SAN provides you deep visibility into the performance requirements and capacity usage of your workloads on a daily basis from the perspective inside the SAN storage systems and fabric. The performance and capacity metrics are stored in a historical trending database so that you can see how these metrics for your workloads grow over time.

  • IntelliMagic Direction

    IntelliMagic Direction uses the knowledge about the requirements of your workloads that IntelliMagic Vision produces to show you what specific hardware upgrades or replacements will work best, for example, more channels for more bandwidth, or more disk drives or SSDs to handle the back-end disk IOs. There is also a version with specific z/OS support.

Storage Capacity Forecasting with IntelliMagic Vision

With traditional tools, storage capacity forecasting is challenging. IntelliMagic Vision provides a simple but effective means to forecast your storage capacity at the storage system and storage pool level. In this video we explain how you can use IntelliMagic Vision’s storage capacity forecasting feature to effectively predict your future capacity needs.

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