Basic questions un-answered by storage scope?

To find out storage left in an array, you can sum up following capacities:

1. Unconfigured capacity
This is the storage that has not been carved into lun. This is raw capacity.

2. Unallocated capacity
This is the capacity that is not mapped or lun masked to host. StorageScope has both raw and usable capacity for this.

1. Unconfigured capacity
This is the storage that has not been carved into lun. This is raw capacity.
Yeah, i'm there after I account for raid, got that.

2. Unallocated capacity
This is the capacity that is not mapped or lun masked to host. StorageScope has both raw and usable capacity for this.
Actually, unallocated can be mapped. Since R1/BCV's and R2 that have R-BCV's aren't masked (or mapped), they show as unallocated as well.

So here is what I'm left with, for what seems like a fairly straight forward question.

Configured Capacity - Systems devices + (unconfigure * Raid) = usable capacity.
(System devices show 5g in ECC, 4.21 in SMC btw).

Free capacity is Configured capacity - Mapped unallocated (not including RDF/BCV) + unmapped unallocated...

You see where I'm going.

I would love to see a canned report (perhaps on the dashboard that simply says how much space I have left on my frame for hosts... Currently I'm relegated to massive spread sheets/custom queries...

Am I the first one that has ever asked how much space is allocated and how much space is left?

Hope I'm missing something.

Hey there nfwtnit,

Welcome to the Forums. I understand your pain and I agree completely that these reports seem to sometimes give lots of info that we don't care about and miss some very important factors.

Now that you have found the Powerlink Forums, oddly enough I'm going to suggest that you also check out the "other" EMC online community for EMC ControlCenter (www.controlcentercommunity.com). This Forum is great for technical support, while the Online User Community is very focused on the future of ControlCenter. There are lots of Developers, Engineers, and Product Managers over there who are looking for this kind of feedback on all components of CC. This would be valuable feedback to provide them as they work on both patches to the current release, and the next release as well.

Regarding your thoughts on R/BCV's and R2 that have R-BCV's being counted under Unallocated Capacity, I wanted to inform you about how Storagescope works these numbers.

"2. Unallocated capacity
This is the capacity that is not mapped or lun masked to host. StorageScope has both raw and usable capacity for this.
Actually, unallocated can be mapped. Since R1/BCV's and R2 that have R-BCV's aren't masked (or mapped), they show as unallocated as well."

If the standard devices behind those R/BCV's and R2 that have R-BCV's are masked/mapped then those R1's and R2's will also be flagged as "array allocated" and "host allocated . Hence these replica devices will not be included in the "Unallocated capacity" (usable and raw) calculations.

Hope that helps.

Anu

You are dealing with the exact same problems with StorageScope that I am. My director says "Tell me how much storage I have, how much is in use and how much I have left" I have both Clariion and Symmetrix arrays. Now try to explain to him that unallocated on one box is not the same as unallocated on the other. It is a real mess.

So it seems I'm not alone with regards all this. We are having the same problems with reporting...allocated and unallocated space is one part of the problem in the reporting. We have 20 Symmetrix and 54 Clariions onsite and also make use of spreadsheets to try and keep this all up-to-date.

Another problem is that we have been asked to report on different categories of storage i.e.: Production Storage, DR storage, FRA storage, Clone storage etc and there is no-way you can tell this from StorageScope what storage is used for what...what would help with this is if the SD_ALLOCA_TYPE field in the STS_DEVICE_ALLOCATION table would be able to cater for more types than just the "Local Replica, Primary, Remote Replica etc...

We had similar questions and opened a case with EMC...below the response we received...

Clariion has capability of creating Raid Groups which have a raid type by default. These RGs while show the assigned raid type and not Unbound, but they are actually unbound as no LUN has been created. These Raid groups were getting added to ConfiguredNotAssigned capacity.

Solution : We are now checking the logical capacity of RG also along with the raid type. Logical capacity of a RG will be 0 in case it's created with default raid type and has no LUNs bound to it. This capacity would be added to UnAllocated capacity.

I understand that the above issue together with additional Clariion issues will be fixed in Update Bundle 7 which currently has a GA date of 2nd December 2009.

I wanted to clarify your understanding on, this being fixed in ECC Console(properties view) in UB7.    The Allocated and Unallocated capacities for Clariion has been removed from ECC Console properties view in UB7.   Please use the Allocated and Unallocated capacities in StorageScope for your further use.   The Unallocated capacity for Clariion in StorageScope does not include unbound raid group capacity.  It can be obtained in the column ConfiguredNotAssigned.  

"

Solution : We are now checking the logical capacity of RG also along with the raid type. Logical capacity of a RG will be 0 in case it's created with default raid type and has no LUNs bound to it. This capacity would be added to UnAllocated capacity.

I understand that the above issue together with additional Clariion issues will be fixed in Update Bundle 7 which currently has a GA date of 2nd December 2009."

This seems to be EMC just giving up by removing it from properties. Why is something as simple as a report showing Allocated and Unallocated space so complicated to get? Based on this info the only way to get this info is to go through creating a custom query/report and then having to create some giant explanation for management on what all the different columns mean. I can honestly say this is causing our management to look at other vendors management and reporting products for storage.

Here is the delima from a long term customer, and certainly not islolated to a few.

There is a vacuum in the reporting.  A fairly large "hole" if you will.

Storage Scope is great for EMC engineers, but provides little, if no value "out of the box" information for customers, and business in general.  What we really need out here, is a tool we can use to make business decisions. While I agree with the party line that SS has a huge amount of data it collects, useful data is lost in the "signal to noise ratio".

I will attempt a wish list below.

DMX:

Usable capacity:

     I cannot fathom why this is not the first metric to start with.  This needs to be right next to the serial number on the properties of Control Center.  Currently it is "configured", but again, as posted above, configured is not usable (and therefore, again, worthless).  There are other variables.

RAW.  Remove it completely from the tool.  There is absolutely no value to ever mentioning this in any way, shape, or form.  It is a very good number to use if wish to end your career.

     *REAL* world example:  Large automobile manufacturer.

     Business unit forcasts 100tb need for next year.

     Management purchases 100tb in 300g drives.

     Storage team provisions 43tb and your out of space.

How much space is remaining?

I have been talking with EMC about this for years, and I think the engineers/product manangers are thinking on a different level than the customer.  The question is very simple, as is the answer (we use excel to figure it out).

When I put a brand new shiny server on the floor, plug it into the switch, how much space is there to allocate to it?

Can use:

Unmapped, unallocated.

Mapped, unallocated, non-timefinder.

Can't use:

Timefinder volumes.

Replication volumes.

In short, anything that already has a purpose cannot be used.

To summarize it at the lowest level possible:

We are Enterprise level customers who need a tool in which we can provide data to management to make solid business decisions.

Storage Scope, in it's current form (in regards to business decisions, Enterprise reporting) can easily be replaced by Excel, symdev list and a calculator..

There is a need to have these many capacity columns because of the diversity in the target audience consuming it.   We have raw and usable flavors for each metric.   It is not very complicated to remove the extraneous information from a built in query.

Storagescope has built in  support for "Unit Conversion" in UB5,  removing the necessity for a user to manually convert the capacity numbers.

"The Allocated and Unallocated numbers are readily available in StorageScope as a query.   There is no need to create a custom query to get these numbers.   Pleas use the built-in query  "5.2 Arrays - All Arrays"  in the Query Builder section. "

This exactly the problem we are all describing here, a lack of clarity. There are 18 columns in that query that return various capacity/utilzation numbers. To get a simple view of our storage I will need to take this information and either import it in to Excel and do a bunch of manipulation on it or build a Crystal report to add up columns, convert them to TB, and import it if I want it to run on a scheduled basis. For me as a storage admin this information detail level is great, giving this query as it sits to a manager along with 20 pages of column explanations is not going to work though. Managers want to be able to see A + B + C = Total,

ECC Console and StorageScope have tried to reconcile the Allocated and Unallocated numbers for Clariion for quite some time.   The algorithm StorageScope uses to calculate these numbers is a agreed upon approach in the industry,  and is consistent with the algorithm used for all other arrays including third party.   The ECC Console did not have all the information to arrive at the same values that StorageScope did for these capacity columns; this inconistency generated customer calls. 

The Allocated and Unallocated numbers are readily available in StorageScope as a query.   There is no need to create a custom query to get these numbers.   Pleas use the built-in query  "5.2 Arrays - All Arrays"  in the Query Builder section. 

Dentonda,

I think for this you will need to create custom fields import them in to Control Center and then go through and assign all you disks or hosts to one of the custom categories and then you can report on them. I have the and XML template to use for creating custom fields and there is a document in the document library that talks about doing it.