BTW, if your DAs are showing over 50% utilization most of the time, that is probably too high.  Going above 50% for breif periods of time during the day is probably OK. 

System WP level events are caused by filling cache with writes faster than the system can destage.

Generally adding cache won't help much, if at all.

This can be corrected by slowing the writes into the system, or speeding up the destage.

Most people don't want to slow the writes into the system, so you probably want to speed up the destage.

First thing to look for is hot drives.  You can hit system WP because of a few hot disks.  In this case you need to spread the load over more drives, or implement cache partitioning so the slow drives don't hurt all the workloads.

If the workload is already spread over the drives, then you generally need to add more drives and/or DA CPUs to speed up the destage.

One other option is to change RAID protection to one that can destage faster, such as from RAID5 to RAID1 or RAID6 to RAID1.

I know that we are collecting STP data on the frame but our CE normally pulls it for us. Is this something that I can pull on my own?

Quincy,

Thanks for the responses.

Here is a sample of our DA utilization for the past 4 hours. Note, that this is normal state for us and we do peak close to the 90% mark often:

Seemed awful high to me.

Also if you have STP data, that could be helpful to me.

Not from the service processor, but it is possible to collect it on the same host that is collecting the SPA data, or another host connected to the Symm with SE installed.

If you want to PM me with the serial # I can possibly get the STP data, depending on how big the files are, and how slow the connection is.

Yes it is.  Looks like you have a DMX2500, so you can add two more pairs of DAs and drives which would cut the DA utilization in half, if you could spread the workload out over the new DAs.

Or maybe it is time for a new VMAX :-)