Block storage systems

Use the Block Storage Systems page to administer and monitor the status, configuration, capacity, and performance information that is collected about the block storage systems in your environment.

Information about block storage systems

Block storage consists of logical volumes that are provisioned to a server in a storage area network (SAN) environment. A block logical volume is typically attached to a single server with protocols such as Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) or Fibre Channel. I/O access on this type of storage system is accomplished through reading or writing individual blocks of data.

IBM Storage Insights subscribers: If you're currently using the free version of IBM Storage Insights, some of the columns listed may not be available.

More detailed information than that provided in the hover help text is provided here for the following columns:

Acknowledged

Shows whether a user marked the status of a storage system as acknowledged. An acknowledged status means that the reported issue was reviewed and was either resolved or can be ignored.

Adjusted Used Capacity (%)

The amount of capacity that can be used without exceeding the capacity limit.

The formula for calculating Adjusted Used Capacity (%) is (Used Capacity in GiB/Capacity Limit in GiB )*100. For example, if the capacity is 100 GiB, the used capacity is 40 GiB, and the capacity limit is 80% or 80 GiB, then the value for Adjusted Used Capacity (%) is (40 GiB/80 GiB )* 100 or 50%. So, in this example, you can use 30% or 40 GiB of the usable capacity of the resource before you reach the capacity limit.

If the used capacity exceeds the capacity limit, the value for Adjusted Used Capacity (%) is over 100%.

To add the Adjusted Used Capacity (%) column, right-click any column heading on the Block Storage Systems page.

See these related values for more information Capacity Limit (%), and Capacity-to-Limit (GiB).

This metric is not available for all storage systems, such as Dell EMC VMAX.

Available Capacity (GiB)

(Previously known as Available Pool Space) The amount of usable capacity that is not yet used in the pools that are associated with a storage system. To calculate available capacity, the following formula is used:

(pool capacity - used capacity)

For XIV systems and IBM Storage Accelerate, pool capacity is the physical capacity of the pools and does not include the provisioned capacity of the pools.

Available Written Capacity (GiB)

(Previously known as Effective Used Capacity) The amount of capacity that can be written to the pools before inline compression is applied. If the pools are not compressed, this value is the same as Available Capacity.

Important: Because data compression is very efficient, a pool can run out of Available Written Capacity while physical capacity is still available. To stay aware of your capacity needs, monitor this value and Available Capacity.

Capacity Limit (%) and Capacity Limit (GiB)

The limit that was set on the capacity that is used by your storage systems. For example, the policy of your company is to keep 20% of the usable capacity of your storage systems in reserve. So, you log into the GUI as Administrator and set the capacity limit to 80%.

Tip Click the illustration above to find out how to set capacity limits.

The GiB value for the capacity limit for the storage system is calculated when you set the value for the Capacity Limit (%).

To add the Capacity Limit (%) and the Capacity Limit (GiB) columns, right-click any column heading on the Block Storage Systems page.

See these related values for more information Adjusted Used Capacity (%) and Capacity-to-Limit (GiB).

This metric is not available for all storage systems, such as Dell EMC VMAX.

Capacity-to-Limit (GiB)

The amount of capacity that is available before the capacity limit is reached.

The formula for calculating Capacity-to-Limit (GiB) is (Capacity Limit in GiB - Used Capacity in GiB). For example, if the capacity limit is 80% or 80 GiB and the used capacity is 40 GiB, then the value for Capacity-to-Limit (GiB) is (80 GiB - 40 GiB or 80% - 50%) which is 30% or 40 GiB.

See these related values for more information Capacity Limit (%) and Adjusted Used Capacity (%).

This metric is not available for all storage systems, such as IBM FlashSystem A9000, IBM FlashSystem A9000R, and Dell EMC VMAX.

Carbon emission (kgCO₂e/h)

The carbon emissions per hour by the storage system.

Condition

The overall condition of the storage system, which is determined by the most critical status that was detected for the storage system's internal resources. For example, if an error is detected on one of the internal resources, such as a disk, then the condition of the storage system is error. To view the individual statuses of internal resources, right-click the storage system and select View Details.

Tip: If Call Home is enabled for a storage system, events that are detected through Call Home do not affect the value for Condition as reported by IBM Storage Insights. For example, a critical event is detected by Call Home, but the status of the storage system and its internal resources are normal based on metadata collection. In this case, the value for Condition still shows Normal and the value for Event is Critical.

Data Collection

The aggregated status for the collection of capacity, configuration, status, and performance metadata. Two separate jobs are run to collect the metadata:

A probe is run once every 24 hours to collect capacity, configuration, and status metadata.
A performance monitor is run every 5 minutes to collect performance metadata. For Dell EMC storage systems, performance metadata is collected every 15 minutes.

Because separate jobs are run to collect the metadata, both collection jobs must be successful to get a Running status. If an issue occurs during metadata collection, the following statuses might also be displayed:

Degraded: Not all metadata for the device was collected. This status is displayed when metadata collection is interrupted and only partial metadata is available.
Device is not providing valid performance data: The performance metadata that was collected for the device doesn't match the expected values based on historical analysis. This analysis examines the performance counters (metadata) for a device. This status is displayed when the counters decrease (rather than increase) between consecutive metadata collections. In those cases, the counters are discarded and the related metrics are not calculated.
Device is not providing valid probe data: The probe metadata that was collected for the device is incomplete or corrupted and can't be displayed.
Device unreachable: A device is offline or your data collectors can't access the device. To collect detailed metrics and status information, a device must be online and a data collector must be connected to it.
Failed: Metadata was not collected for the device. This status might be displayed for a number of conditions, such as a service interruption, a network outage, or a device that is unavailable. If the failure was caused by an interruption or a global problem with the service, IBM® is investigating the issue and you'll be notified when the data collection service is resumed.
Tip: To quickly list storage systems where data collection failed, select Data Collection in the filter list and Failed in the Choose Value list. Doing so will return all storage systems that have any failure statuses reported.
No Call Home contact: Call Home with cloud services is unable to contact the storage system. To collect status, configuration, capacity, and performance metadata, Call Home with cloud services must be able to access the device.
Stopped: This status is displayed when data collection is manually stopped or when data collection was restarted but the restart failed.
Task expired: This status might be displayed for a number of conditions or temporary problems within the service.
Unknown: This status might be displayed if the probe or performance monitor had an error status that is no longer true. For example, if the status of previous probe was "Invalid Credentials" or "Device Unreachable" and that problem is resolved, Unknown is displayed. The next run of a probe or performance monitor clears this status.
Zimon is not running: The ZIMon collector on the IBM Spectrum® Scale cluster node is not running and metadata can't be collected.
Invalid Credentials: The user name or password that IBM Storage Insights uses to connect to a device is not correct. This status is displayed when the credentials of the user on the device were changed but were not update in IBM Storage Insights, the user name was removed from the device, or the credentials were entered incorrectly in IBM Storage Insights.

Help with statuses:

For more information about these statuses and how you can troubleshoot them, see Monitoring the status of data collection.
Subscribers are notified by email when issues with collecting data are detected. If an issue with collecting data persists and you can't resolve the issue, you can get help by submitting a post in the IBM Storage Community. For other support options, see Looking for help.

Data Reduction (GiB)

A set of techniques that can be used to reduce the amount of usable capacity that is required to store data. Examples of data reduction include data deduplication and compression. The amount of capacity that is written by applications, compared to the capacity that is stored on the storage system after written data is compressed, deduplicated, or both.

Data reduction can increase storage efficiency and performance and reduce storage costs. Data reduction reduces the amount of data that is stored on the system using a number of methods. The system supports data reduction pools, which contain thin-provisioned, compressed, and deduplicated volumes.

Data Reduction Ratio

The ratio of capacity that is written by applications, compared to the capacity that is stored on the system after written data is compressed, deduplicated, or both. This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.5.1 or later only.

Deduplication Savings (%)

The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved by using data deduplication, across all data reduction pools on the storage system. The percentage is calculated across all deduplicated volumes in the pools and does not include the capacity of volumes that are not deduplicated.

The following formula is used to calculate the amount of storage space that is saved:

written capacity − deduplicated size

The following formula is used to calculate the percentage of capacity that is saved:

((written capacity − deduplicated size) ÷ written capacity) × 100

For example, the written capacity, which is the amount of data that is written to the volumes before deduplication, is 40 GiB. The deduplicated size, which reflects the size of deduplicated data that is written to disk, is just 10 GB. Therefore, data deduplication reduced the size of the data that is written by 75%.

This metric is available for IBM FlashSystem A9000, IBM FlashSystem A9000R, and resources that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.1.3 or later.

Drive Compression Ratio

The ratio of the uncompressed data size to the compressed data size for all the managed disks in a storage system. This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.4.0.0 or later.

Drive Compression Savings

The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved in all of the managed disks in a storage system. This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.4.0.0 or later.

FC Ports

The number of Fibre Channel ports that are on the nodes on a storage system.

Firmware

The firmware version of the microcode on a storage system.

For the DS series of storage systems, this value represents the Code Bundle version and the SEA or LMC Version of the firmware.
For the Hitachi storage systems, this value represents the SVP and the main microcode levels of the firmware.

FlashCopy Volumes

The number of volumes that are in FlashCopy pair relationships.

IP Ports

The number of Internet Protocol ports that are on the nodes on a storage system.

Maintenance end time

Time when the schedule maintenance of storage system ends.

Maintenance start time

Time when the maintenance is started or will start if scheduled for maintenance.

Maintenance status

Current status of the storage system maintenance. Values include Running for ongoing maintenance, Cancelled for exiting the scheduled maintenance Stopped for stopping the ongoing maintenance, and Completed for the completed maintenance.

Mapped Capacity (GiB)

(Previously known as Assigned Volume Space) The total volume space in the storage system that is mapped or assigned to host systems.

VDisk mirroring

The number of volumes that are used for VDisk mirroring. The number includes target volumes or secondary volumes of VDisk mirrors in storage virtualizer pools. The VDisk mirrors are in pools in SAN Volume Controller and Storwize family storage systems that are configured with block storage.

Learn more: To view more information about the volumes, click the number that is shown in the column.

Name

A user-defined name of the storage system. If a name was not defined, the name that was defined when the storage system was added for monitoring is shown.

Performance Monitor Status

The status of the most recent run of a performance monitor. Use this value to quickly identify a performance monitor that failed or generated warning messages during processing. If a performance monitor is run while a storage system is unreachable, its status is not shown in the column. Instead, the status of the previous performance monitor is shown.

Help with statuses: For more information about the different statuses that can be displayed and how you can troubleshoot them, see Monitoring the status of data collection.

Probe Status

The status of the most recent run of a probe. Use this value to quickly identify a probe that failed or generated warning messages during processing. If a probe is run while a device is unreachable, its status is not shown in the column. Instead, the status of the previous probe is shown.

Help with statuses: For more information about the different statuses that can be displayed and how you can troubleshoot them, see Monitoring the status of data collection.

Pool Compression Ratio

The ratio of the uncompressed data size to the compressed data size for all the pools in a storage system. This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.4.0.0 or later.

Pool Compression Savings

The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved in all of the pools in a storage system. This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.4.0.0 or later.

Power Efficiency (Watts/Raw TB)

It is the total power consumed by the storage systems in Watts. It denotes how much and how efficiently the power is consumed by the storage devices. The value of power efficiency is the consumption of total power divided by raw capacity bytes of the device.

Ransomware Threat Detection

Shows if the ransomware threat detection alert is enabled for storage system or not.

Raw Capacity (GB)

(Previously known as Raw Disk Capacity) The total raw (unformatted) disk capacity of a storage system. The capacity of managed disks and external disks for storage virtualizers is included in the calculation. The capacity of spare disks that are identified on IBM System Storage DS8000 storage systems is not included in the calculation.

Read Cache

The amount of read cache memory that is internal to the storage system.

Recent Fill Rate (%)

The rate at which the capacity of the storage system is being consumed over the last 30 days. Use this value to see how quickly your storage systems are filling up.

If 30 days of historical data is not available, it is the difference between today's fill rate % and the oldest value for the fill rate % in the last 30 days.

If you want to add the growth rate in GiB, right-click any column heading and click Recent Growth (GiB).

To see the Recent Fill Rate (%) for the pools in IBM Storage Insights Pro, double-click the storage system, and click View capacity by pool on the Overview page.

To see the Recent Fill Rate (%) for the pools in IBM Storage Insights, double-click the storage system, and click View capacity by pool in the Capacity section of the Overview tab.

Did you know:

IBM Storage Insights users can now also create capacity reports for block storage systems and pools, and inventory reports for block storage systems. Try it out! From the menu, click Reports and pick a report.

Recent Growth (GiB)

The amount of used capacity that is consumed by the storage system over the last 30 days. Use this value to identify the storage systems with the highest growth rates in used capacity.

Recent growth is the difference between today's used capacity of the storage system and the used capacity of the storage system that was reported 30 days ago. If 30 days of historical data is not available, it is the difference between today's used capacity for the storage system and the oldest value for the used capacity of the storage system that was reported in the last 30 days.

To see the growth in used capacity for the pools in IBM Storage Insights Pro, double-click the storage system, and click View capacity by pool on the Overview page.

To see the growth in used capacity for the pools in IBM Storage Insights, double-click the storage system, and click View capacity by pool in the Capacitysection of the Overview tab.

This metric is not available for all storage systems, such as IBM FlashSystem A9000, IBM FlashSystem A9000R, and Dell EMC VMAX.

Safeguarded Capacity (GiB)

The capacity that is consumed by all of the Safeguarded Copies for a source volume in IBM Storage Virtualize and DS8000. This value applies only to volumes that are the source in a Safeguarded Copy relationship.

Shortfall (%)

The percentage of the remaining unused volume capacity in a pool that is not available to be used. The shortfall represents the relative risk of running out of capacity for overallocated thin-provisioned volumes. If the pools have sufficient available capacity to satisfy the remaining unused volume capacity, no shortfall exists. As the remaining unused volume capacity grows, or as the available pool capacity decreases, the shortfall increases and the risk of running out of capacity becomes higher. If the available capacity of the pool is exhausted, the shortfall is 100% and any volumes that are not yet fully used have run out of space.

To calculate the shortfall, the following formula is used:

[(overprovisioned capacity ÷ committed but available capacity) × 100]

You can use this percentage to determine when the amount of over-committed capacity in pools is at a critically high level. Specifically, if the physical capacity in pools is less than the committed provisioned capacity, then the pools do not have enough capacity to fulfill the commitment to provisioned capacity. The shortfall represents the percentage of the committed provisioned capacity that is not available in pools. As more space is used over time by volumes while the pool capacity remains the same, this percentage increases.

For example, there are two pools in a storage system. Each pool has a different capacity and amount of space that is committed to its volumes.

The physical capacity of pool "A" is 70 GiB, but 150 GiB of provisioned capacity was committed to volumes. If the volumes are using 50 GiB, 100 GiB is still committed to the volumes (150 GiB - 50 GiB). Only 20 GiB of capacity (70 GiB - 50 GiB) in the pool is available. For this pool, the overprovisioned capacity is 80 GiB (100 GiB - 20 GiB) and the shortfall is 80% [(80 GiB ÷ 100 GiB × 100].
The physical capacity of pool "B" is 200 GiB, but only 35 GiB of provisioned capacity was committed to volumes. If the volumes are using 10 GiB, 25 GiB is still committed to the volumes (35 GiB - 10 GiB). In this case, 190 GiB of remaining capacity in the pool (200 GiB - 10 GiB) is enough to contain the 25 GiB that is still committed to the volumes. For this pool, the overprovisioned capacity is 0 GiB and the shortfall percentage is 0%.

If a storage system consists of pools A and B, the overprovisioned capacity for the storage system is 80 GiB (80 GiB from pool A + 0 GiB from pool B). The space that was committed to volumes but not yet allocated is 125 GiB (100 GiB from pool A + 25 GiB from pool B). Therefore, the shortfall percentage for the storage system is 64% [(80 GiB ÷ 125 GiB) × 100].

The first section of the bar uses the color blue and a percent (%) sign to represent the shortfall percentage. The second section of the bar uses the color gray to represent the volume space that is not allocated. Hover the mouse pointer over the percentage bar to view the following values.

Overprovisioned Capacity: (Previously known as Unallocatable Volume Space) The amount of capacity by which the Total Provisioned exceeds the physical capacity of a pool. In thin-provisioned environments, it is possible to over commit (over provision) storage in a pool by creating volumes with more provisioned capacity than can be physically allocated in the pool. This value represents the amount of volume capacity that cannot be used based on the current capacity of the pool.
Available Volume Capacity: (Previously known as Unallocated Volume Space) The amount of the Total Provisioned in pools that is not used. The space that is used by thin-provisioned volumes is typically less than their provisioned capacity. Therefore, the capacity that is not used represents the difference between the provisioned capacity and the used capacity for all the volumes in the pool.

Support Contract

Shows if the storage system has a contract with IBM support and the status of that contract. The following values might be shown:

Confirmed: The storage system or component has an active contract with IBM Support.
Blank: This value is blank if the storage system or component does not have an active contract with IBM Support.

Tip: To see the status of the support contract for storage virtualizers, you must view the properties of the associated nodes or enclosures.

Synchronous Replica Volumes: The number of volume pairs that are in Metro Mirror relationships.

System Temperature (^oC): It is the average temperature of the storage device in Celsius.
System Temperature (^oF): It is the average temperature of the storage device in Fahrenheit.

Total Savings (%)

The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved by using data deduplication, pool compression, thin provisioning, and drive compression, across all volumes in the pool.

The following formula is used to calculate the amount of storage space that is saved:

[Total Capacity − Used Capacity]

The following formula is used to calculate the percentage of capacity that is saved:

((Total Capacity − Used Capacity) ÷ Total Capacity) × 100

This metric is available for IBM FlashSystem A9000 and IBM FlashSystem A9000R, IBM Storage Accelerate, XIV storage systems with firmware version 11.6 or later, and storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize.

Threat Notification Recipients

Individuals or entities who receives email communication when potential threats are identified. When there is '-' in Threat Notification Recipients column, the emails are sent to global notification email IDs if threat detection is enabled.

Total Compression Ratio

The ratio of the uncompressed data size to the compressed data size for the entire storage system. The value N/A is displayed if the storage system contains at least one pool that uses compressing Flash Core Module (FCM) drives and also contains at least one compressed volume in any type of pool.

This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.4.0.0 or later.

Total Compression Savings

The estimated amount and percentage of capacity that is saved in a storage system by using data compression techniques.

This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.4.0.0 or later.

Turbo Performance

The turbo performance mode determines whether the performance of the Storwize or SAN Volume Controller storage system is enhanced. If turbo performance mode is not available for the storage system, the field is left blank.

Total Provisioned (%)

(Previously known as Provisioned Capacity (%)) The percentage of physical capacity in the pools that is committed to the total provisioned capacity of the volumes. If the value is greater than 100%, more provisioned capacity is committed to the volumes than is physically available to the pools.

To calculate the provisioned percentage, the following formula is used:

[(total provisioned capacity ÷ pool capacity) × 100]

For example, if the total provisioned percentage is 200% for a storage pool with a physical capacity of 15 GiB, then the total provisioned that is committed to the volumes in the pools is 30 GiB. Twice as much capacity is committed to the pools than is physically available to the pools. If the total provisioned percentage is 100% and the physical capacity is 15 GiB, then the total provisioned that is committed to the pools is 15 GiB. The total physical capacity that is available to the pools is allocated to the volumes in the pools.

A total provisioned percentage that is higher than 100% is considered to be aggressive because there is insufficient physical capacity available to the pools to satisfy the allocation of the committed capacity to the compressed and thin-provisioned volumes in the pools. In such cases, you can check the Shortfall (%) value to determine how critical the shortage of capacity is for the storage system pools.

Total Provisioned (GiB)

(Previously known as Provisioned Capacity (GiB)) Total capacity of all volumes that are created on the storage system, which includes volumes that are not mapped to hosts.

Total Savings Ratio

The ratio of all the capacity savings after data reduction and thin-provisioning compared to the capacity that is stored on the storage system after data is compressed, deduplicated, or both.

This metric is available for storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize 8.5.1 or later.

Unmapped Capacity (GiB)

(Previously known as Unassigned Volume Space) The total volume space in the storage system that is not mapped or assigned to storage systems.

Unprotected Volumes

The number of volumes that don't have copies and that are not the source volume or the target volume of a copy services relationship.

Usable Capacity (GiB)

(Previously known as Capacity (GiB)) The total amount of physical and usable capacity in the storage system. Pools that are allocated from other pools are not included in the total capacity. For XIV systems and IBM Storage Accelerate, this value represents the physical ("hard") capacity of the storage system, not the total provisioned ("soft") capacity.

Used Capacity (%)

(Previously known as Physical Allocation) The percentage of physical capacity in the pools that is used, including overhead capacity. The value is always less than or equal to 100% because you cannot use more physical capacity on the volumes than is available in the pools.

To calculate used capacity percentage, the following formula is used:

[(used capacity ÷ pool capacity) × 100]

For example, if the used capacity percentage is 25% for a storage pool with a capacity of 200 GiB, then the capacity that is allocated to the volumes is 50 GiB.

A bar is displayed which represents the total amount of storage capacity in pools. Move the mouse pointer over the bar to display a text summary and details of the used capacity and the pool capacity, which is divided into the following values:

Used Capacity: (Previously known as Allocated Space) The physical capacity that is used on all of the volumes, which includes thin-provisioned, compressed, and standard-provisioned volumes, in the pools on the storage system. If the empty thin-provisioned volumes are removed from the pools, it might not change the value of used capacity, which represents that the thin-provisioning and data reduction are combined.
Note: For Hitachi VSP, used capacity is the total amount of capacity that is allocated to standard-provisioned volumes that are not used for thin-provisioned pools, and the real capacity that is allocated to thin-provisioned volumes.
Capacity: The total amount of space in storage system pools.
Available System Capacity: The amount of unused capacity in the storage system pools that is reserved for provisioning and optimization tasks.

Note: If your system contains thin-provisioned volumes, ensure that the volume is created with compression enabled in data reduction pools. If not, the system cannot calculate accurate available capacity.

Used Written Capacity (%)

(Previously known as Effective Used Capacity) For devices with inline hardware compression, the effective used capacity percentage is the percentage of capacity that is provisioned to the standard-provisioned volumes and the thin-provisioned volumes, given the drive compression savings.

Used Written Capacity (GiB)

(Previously known as Effective Used Capacity) The amount of capacity that is written to the volumes in a pool before inline disk compression is applied. If a pool is not compressed, this value is the same as Used Capacity.

Write Cache

The amount of write cache memory that is internal to the storage system.

Written Capacity Limit (GiB)

(Previously known as Effective Capacity) The maximum of amount of capacity that can be written to a pool before inline-disk compression is applied. If a pool is not compressed, this value is the same as Capacity.