Data collection
Before you start a study, determine if you have usable data, by collecting this information:
Data Input Types
 – Server Level (iostat, perfmon, PT Reports)
 – Storage Controller Level (DS Storage Manager, IBM Storage Control, IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI))
 – If using automated input, try to pull a week’s worth of data representing a heavy timeframe such as month-end in 15-minute intervals
Selecting modeling inputs – selecting peaks and noticing anomalies
Regardless of the data type, there are critical physical disk counters that you need:
 – Read IO
 – Write IO
 – Total IO
 – Read Cache Hits
 – Read Transfer size (KiB)
 – Write Transfer size (KiB)
 – Average Transfer size (KiB)