Workload skew curve

Edit online

Easy Tier® also enables workload statistical data collection. The workload skew curve provides a way to demonstrate the skew of workload I/O activity.

The workload categorization tracks the Easy Tier movements (promote, demote, swap, auto rebalance, warm demote, and Easy Tier Application) at every 5-minute cycle. The workload skew curve then summarizes the workload distribution across the tiers to help judge whether the workload distribution across tiers is expected.

You can use the data from the workload skew curve for the following activities:
  • Provide guidance on tier configuration. Based on the workload skew, you can use the data to identify which appropriate flash-drive configuration should contain the expected workload. This data can also provide guidance on how much flash-drive capacity is needed to handle a certain percentage of a workload. Easy Tier iterates the sorted data by heat in decreasing order at a fixed granule (100 GB) and summarizes the accumulative workload in a summary heat file.
  • Validate the behavior of Easy Tier. For example, based on the current Easy Tier algorithm, a flash-drive tier will most likely contain smaller I/O activity while it also contains I/O activity that is not as large. Also, an Enterprise tier should contain larger I/O activity.

You can download the workload skew report by using the Export Easy Tier Summary option available from the Export icon on the System page.