Rating: +0
Storage Assessments are file and volume level data collection that gives the SAN admin an idea about unused space, legacy files, better lun layout and things of that nature.
Reginald,
I think a SAN assessment should do a lot more than report on files and space etc. I would expect that today’s SAN admins should have that information at their finger tips. And if I’m not mistaken they usually see that the majority of their space is being consumed by mpegs. Anyway, a SAN assessment to be really useful to the SAN admin needs to do a lot more - for example, evaluating all of the SAN's application’s data and pathing, analyze all of the possible paths to that data, including alternate routes, failover routes (such as 2ndary routes through redundant fabric), local or remote replicas, etc. and provide recommendations along optimizing data pathing for application performance, resiliency, etc. Another common area is to review and assess the standard provisioning blunder of allocating space for databases (i.e. Oracle) on a pure capacity basis instead of spindles. That’s just a couple there are many more which can be added to an assessment ala-carte menu. The assessment should address the most common areas that affect all SAN admins and then have lots of value-adds that can be performed optionally.
Lastly, the assessment should have some over riding goals; improving TTP time to provision, creating a QOS quality of service framework based on underlying SLA’s, Knowledge transfer, etc.
If an assessment contained this type of value based analysis, recommendations and training - I think it would be very well received.
Good Luck,
Peter
October 2008