Capacity planning overview

Learn more about how you can plan capacity and detect capacity shortfalls by using IBM Storage Insights Pro to monitor your storage environment. Use predictive analytics and capacity insights so that you know how much capacity you need and when you'll need it.

To help you plan capacity and detect capacity shortfalls, IBM Storage Insights Pro analyzes the capacity metadata that it collects about storage systems, back-end storage systems, and internal resources such as pools, volumes, and disks.

To plan capacity, you need information such as:
  • How much capacity you currently have
  • How much capacity you currently consume
  • How much capacity can be reclaimed
  • How much capacity can be placed on cheaper storage media

You need historical capacity information to identify trends in storage consumption such as dips and surges in the demand for block, file, or object storage. To help you get the most out of the storage that you purchase, you need to know what cost savings are achieved when you use reduced pools, compress your data, deduplicate your data, or thin provision volumes.

To plan capacity purchases efficiently, IBM Storage Insights Pro provides you with:
  • Capacity depletion charts, which analyze historical storage consumption to predict when you will run out of block and file storage.
  • Summary capacity information about physical capacity, available capacity, and the capacity savings that were achieved.
  • Capacity information presented in tables and charts that allow you to review current and historical capacity consumption.
  • Capacity reporting. You can now use custom reports to easily create, customize, schedule, and send capacity reports by email. You can also create chargeback and storage consumption reports about the cost and the amount of storage that is consumed by physical servers, applications, and departments.
  • Exporting capacity information feature that allows you to export capacity data to a spreadsheet, PDF file, or HTML file.
Tip: To help you prioritize capacity purchases, you can create general groups and applications to identify the capacity that is being consumed by critical business applications or groups of storage resources such as the storage resources that are used by your production platform.
Check out these capacity planning features:
Capacity planning Creating predefined capacity reports Creating predefined inventory reports Creating custom reports Creating chargeback and consumer reports Viewing insight charts Capacity views Capacity views Exporting information to a file Setting capacity limits Check out Recent Fill Rate and Recent Growth Rate