Reclamation views

Use the recommendations to reclaim capacity before you plan new capacity purchases.

Got an alert that your storage system is running out of capacity? Or, did you click Resources > Pools, had a look at the values in the Zero Capacity column and saw that you were running out of capacity?

Instead of purchasing more capacity, click Insights > Reclamation to see how much capacity you can reclaim.

Prerequisites for running the reclamation analysis

To determine which volumes can be reclaimed, capacity and performance data must be available. Capacity data for the previous day and daily aggregated performance data for the previous 14 days are required for the reclamation analysis.

How it works

The reclamation analysis is performed on every "FULL PROBE" (Data Collection that happens once a day by default). If sufficient data is collected, recommendations are generated to reclaim volumes that meet either of the following criteria:

The volume is not assigned to a host.
No I/O activity was detected for the volume in the collected data.

For example, if the reclamation analysis determines that a volume is not assigned to a host,the volume is identified as reclaimable even if I/O activity is detected. Conversely, if no I/Oactivity is detected for a volume, it is identified as reclaimable even if it is assigned to a host.

Note: If a volume is shown as reclaimable and then that volume is mapped to a host, it is removed from the reclamation list only after a FULL_PROBE.

The reclamation analysis also detects if volumes are replica volumes, VDisk mirrored volumes, or FlashCopy® volumes. The same criteria are used to identify whether the volumes are reclaimable, but the process varies depending on the type of copy volume:

Replica volumes: The source volumes of volumes with replicas, such as volumes that use Metro Mirror or Global Mirror copy services, are analyzed to determine whether the volumes are reclaimable.
VDisk mirrored volumes: Both copies of the VDisk mirrored volume are analyzed to determine whether the volumes are reclaimable.
FlashCopy volumes: The target volumes of volumes in FlashCopy relationships are analyzed if the source volumes are identified as reclaimable.

After the analysis is run, you see the total capacity that can be reclaimed, which is broken down by tier, and by volume. (The reclaimable capacity for volumes in storage systems that use data reduction technologies isn't shown. See the restrictions below.) In the table, you get a list of the volumes, the volume's capacity, and the information that you need to decide whether you want to decommission the volumes.

Tip: See volumes that are identified as reclaimable, such as volumes that are used to back up data or volumes that you recently assigned to a new application? If you don’t want to include these volumes in the reclamation analysis, right-click the volumes and click Exclude from Analysis.

Before you reclaim space

It's a good practice to verify that the identified volumes are available for reclamation. Before you delete or reclaim space that was identified by IBM® Storage Insights, keep in mind the following additional considerations:

For volumes on IBM Storage Accelerate and CKD volumes on DS8000, the volumes are identified as reclaimable based on I/O activity, because information about the assignment of volumes to servers is not available.
For non-IBM storage systems, volumes are be identified as reclaimable based on I/O activity because information about their existing server assignments, replication relationships, and snapshot targets might not be available for the storage system. Check with your storage administrators to ensure that the identified volumes are available for reclamation and are not part of these other configurations.
Volumes in storage systems that use data reduction technologies are identified as reclaimable, but the actual physical capacity of the volumes can’t be determined. For example, when data is deduplicated, multiple volumes can share identical blocks of data so we don't know the actual capacity of each volume. Because we can’t determine the capacity of the individual volumes, the total reclaimable capacity for each volume is displayed as zero. This applies to:
- Volumes in IBM storage systems that support data reduction pools or volumes in storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize.
- Volumes in IBM FlashSystem A9000 storage systems.

Private volumes in Dell EMC storage systems are excluded from the reclamation analysis.