Rapid VPLEX Capacity Planner with XML/PERL/SQLite

In many customer installations, multiple business units share VPLEX-based storage. This results in IT administrators, managers, and CIOs trying to answer interesting questions from customers about chargeback for VPLEX-based storage. Typical questions include:

• What storage is allocated and currently used for an application that has HOST 1, HOST 2, and so on?

• We need to add 100 TB of storage. How do we find the optimal port where storage should be added?

• Is the storage allocated optimally across all the front-end ports?

Manually calculating the storage allocated can be very time consuming. In their Knowledge Sharing article, authors Mintulal Debnath and Salem Sampath describe a methodology they have devised for reading the XML VPLEX configuration database using open source tools such Perl, XML, and SQLite. Their simple, easy-to-use tool can save hours of manual calculation. Through relational database technology (RDBMS) using SQLite and scripting, standard and ad hoc reports can be created in minutes.

Their solution has been successfully implemented in a Fortune 500 company, saving hours of work. The level of automation the solution provides positively impacts TCE and requires little to no learning curve to adopt.

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