Evaluating workload placement advice

About this task

IBM Storage Insights evaluates your new workloads or storage partitions for the past year historical capacity growth and forecasts for the next years. After evaluating, IBM Storage Insights lists the best compatible IBM Storage FlashSystem systems by ranks to migrate your storage partitions.

Procedure

To evaluate the new workload parameters or storage partitions and get a list of best compatible IBM Storage FlashSystem systems for migration, perform the following steps:

  1. Go to Planning > Workload placement advisor in the modern UI. Alternatively, to evaluate only storage partition placement from the Storage partitions page, click the vertical dots menu at the end of each partition, and select Evaluate placement.
    If you are in classic UI of IBM Storage Insights, go to Insights > Workload placement advisor.
  2. By default, IBM Storage Insights considers past one year historical capacity growth and forecasts for the next one year to rank the storage systems to migrate your new workload or storage partitions. If you want to change this time frame, click Click here to change, specify the date range, and click Apply.
  3. Enter all relevant details in the New workload or Storage partitions tab under the Workload details section, depending on what you want to evaluate and migrate.
    • If you are in New workload tab:
      1. Select your new workload type as Custom. If you are not sure about the details of your new workload, you can choose from the standard workload templates such as OLTP or OLAP and select workload size as Small, Medium, or Large based on your requirements. OLTP and OLAP are industry standard acronyms for online transaction processing and online analytical processing respectively.
      2. Enter the capacity that is needed for your new workload and expected yearly capacity growth. Also, you can mention the capacity percentage that is needed for snapshot or safeguarded copies in Snapshot/Safeguarded Copies. You can enable or disable Snapshot/Safeguarded Copies for the new workload
      3. Enter all the relevant details such as IOPS, read transfer size, write transfer size, read write ratio, and latency.
    • If you are in Storage partitions tab:
      1. Select the FlashSystem Grid from the Flash Grid drop-down.
      2. Select the storage partition that you want to evaluate and migrate from the Storage partition drop-down. Click the partition detail view icon to view basic details of the partitions before selection.
  4. To filter the storage systems search for evaluating your new workload, select the relevant details in the Set target storage system section.
    • If you are evaluating the new workload:
      1. Select the specific FlashSystem grid from the Flash Grid drop-down.
      2. Select the storage systems from the Storage Systems drop-down.

        Select the specific IBM Storage FlashSystem systems that you want to evaluate for placement. While all the IBM Storage FlashSystem systems in your environment are considered by default, selecting only the relevant systems can improve the recommendation speed.

    • If you are evaluating the storage partition:
      1. Select the storage systems from the Storage systems drop-down.
  5. To reset all the new workload related fields and parameters, click Reset Changes. To proceed for getting the storage systems list that matches your workload or storage partition requirements, click Evaluate. A list of best compatible IBM Storage FlashSystem systems is displayed by scores based on your new workload or storage partition requirements.
    After clicking Evaluate in the Storage partitions tab, a task is created to process the request. You can stay on the page or navigate away. When the task is completed, you will receive a notification and can view the results by clicking View details in the Tasks > Completed.
    Important:
    • If you select 10 or more storage systems before making an evaluate request, a warning message informs you that the current request may take more time to respond. You can choose to proceed with the request or filter the storage systems to receive a faster response for those specific storage systems.
    • If the initial evaluation included 10 IBM Storage FlashSystem systems, and after reviewing the results, you decide to prioritize the analysis of only 2 specific systems, you can easily remove the others from the displayed results using the filtering option in the Select storage system(s) tab and click Evaluateto analyze the specific storage systems.

What to do next

Click Migrate now to initiate the storage partition migration to the target storage system. After evaluating the storage partition, the migration is not allowed if the target storage system has four or more storage partitions. For more information, see Migrating a storage partition.

You can expand each storage system from the list to view detailed charts for several key parameters including capacity, IOPS, data rate, latency, and CPU utilization. You can also download and save the details of the expanded storage systems in CSV format. Each chart displays three specific data points:

  • Historical Growth: This line shows the historical trend of the metric over time.
  • Forecasted Growth (Without New Workload): This line indicates that the predicted future growth of the metric assuming no additional workload is added.
  • Forecasted Growth (With New Workload): This line forecasts the metric's growth with the inclusion of your planned new workload.

Also, each chart displays the threshold values for each metric, such as the capacity limit in the capacity chart. This threshold is a critical factor that is used to calculate the individual score assigned to each metric.

Note: The evaluation confidence score for a storage system might be lower in scenarios involving Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) or multiple storage pools.
For the storage partitions, the evaluation confidence score for a storage system might be lower in the following scenarios:
  • The target storage system already has four storage partitions.
  • The warranty of the target storage system expires within the next 30 days.
  • The target storage system has a ransomware threat.

These factors can impact the overall storage system score.