American Megatrends: StorTrends iDATA IT Infrastructure Assessment Tool

American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) announced StorTrends iDATA (Intelligent Data Analysis Tracking Application), a free software tool designed to provide an accurate assessment of IT infrastructure performance, capacity and throughput requirements.

By measuring all of the necessary components of an IT infrastructure, the tool can assess pain points in an environment before they become disruptive and provide the details needed to make informed storage decisions.
 
“Our research finds that one of the key reasons storage installations fail is that IT administrators lack the accurate information needed to properly provision the performance, capacity and throughput the environment requires to deliver optimum storage efficiency,” said Deni Connor, founding analyst, SSG-NOW. “Are you considering SSDs in an all-flash or hybrid storage array? How much hot data or active data do you have within your existing environment and how much SSD or Flash space do you need? Don’t worry, most IT directors and IT admins don’t know the answer either. The StorTrends iDATA tool is a free and powerful way to answer this question and many more. It provides the key details organizations need, such as the amount of IO/s a SAN requires, the environment’s expected growth rate, and the amount of hot data or active data – to more accurately achieve your storage goals and eliminate the need to overprovision costly storage resources.”
 
The software tool runs, non-intrusively, in the background of an existing IT environment for seven days. Once complete, the tool produces an analysis output file to generate a report that provides metrics including capacity utilization, IO/s usage, reads versus writes for volumes, network bandwidth performance, server statistics and application information. The resulting metrics can be used to develop a short and long-term storage strategy with heightened confidence.
 
StorTrends iData Identifies Customers IT Infrastructure Problems
for Proactive Resolution and Planning
Restaurant Technology, Inc. (RTI), in restaurant food and labor costs savings, uses StorTrends iDATA to provide the insight it needed to optimize its storage capacity and performance planning.

“The StorTrends iDATA tool quickly pointed out the IO/s, active data and throughput requirements within our infrastructure to be better prepared to get the most of our storage investment,” said Phil Blakely, network and systems administrator, RTI. “As a result we are planning to implement another StorTrends SAN Array knowing that we can maximize its performance and leverage the exact amount of flash capacity we need to optimize our applications and support our customers. It removed the guesswork and gave use the confidence that we needed to select the proper SAN configuration for our requirements today and for the future.”

• Active Data Identification/Hot Data – The StorTrends iDATA tool can identify the active or hot data within a customer’s environment. This allows the customer to make an educated purchase of higher performance drives, such as SSD/flash or SAS. This allows the customer to avoid costly over provisioning (which is what most vendors push to achieve higher revenue marks) and under provisioning (which would starve applications and create bottlenecks in the new environment). The tool allows a customer to be comfortable in making future purchases and changes to his or her environment by knowing their active or hot data versus their inactive or cold data. This is a main pointer for the customer to determine if their applications require all-flash, hybrid (mixture of SSD and HDD) or all-spinning disk.
• VDI Requirements/ User and App Performance – Many VDI implementations fail due to underestimating the profiles of all the users within the VDI infrastructure. The StorTrends iDATA tool can be ran on users existing setups and will identify the key metrics to identify the user profile as a Light, Medium, Power Standard or Power Heavy user. This allows for the proper selection of server compute and storage (i.e. physical CPU, virtual cores CPU, memory, SSD capacity and quantity) to ensure the required performance. Without accurately measuring the existing user profiles, customers have no real insight and this can create issues in performance for the users and applications in the VDI environment. The tool measures the exact usage of existing users and outputs the analysis so exact measurements can be used to pinpoint and provision the exact amount of needed server compute and storage resources – avoiding over provisioning and under provisioning which is often costly and detrimental to VDI setups.
• Capacity Growth /Resource Requirements – Customers that are running existing storage and that are looking to refresh their existing unit are primary candidates to run the StorTrends iDATA tool. It can identify the performance in regards to reads versus writes, the total IO/s and the throughput. This allows the customer to identify the type and quantity of disk required for their refresh. The tool monitors the average daily growth of the data while monitoring the customer’s environment. This allows for intelligent growth planning to ensure the replacement storage can scale properly with the company’s actual data growth requirements.

Key metrics evaluated by StorTrends iDATA include:

• Capacity Usage & Growth
• IO/s (Read versus Writes)
• Network Utilization
• Hot/Active and Cold/Inactive data
• System Performance
• Application Loads
• Latency (ms)
• Queue Depth
• IO Size

“When it comes to storage infrastructure, the unknowns can have a serious impact on your environment’s success,” said Justin Bagby, director of StorTrends division, American Megatrends. “With the StorTrends iDATA software tool, we are eliminating those unknown factors that can cause critical storage headaches down the road.  In one week, organizations can have the clear view of their infrastructure demands and make more informed decisions that will deliver long-term value in the areas of operational performance, availability and agility. This allows the organization to make precise purchasing and upgrade decisions for all storage types such as all-flash storage, hybrid storage or spinning disk storage.”