EMC ECS Storage Pool Test

Storage pool in EMS ECS is a way to pool the nodes together to provide adequate storage and organize storage resources based on business requirements. Administrators can create physical separation of data by partitioning the storage into multiple different storage pools. Each application using the storage can use a separate storage pool assigned to it.

The purpose of the test is to identify the health of nodes, the health of disks, and capacity available on the storage pool, the insights from the analysis of metrics can help administrators to plan maintenance of the pool if required and adding/removing capacity as guided by business requirement.

Target of the test : A Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage System

Agent deploying the test : A remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each Vdisk being monitored

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter Description

Test period

How often should the test be executed .

Host

The host for which the test is to be configured. Since the storage device is managed using the IP address of its storage controller, the same will be displayed as host.

Port

The port number at which the specified host listens. By default, this is NULL.

ECS REST API Port

This is the port at which REST API connectivity is provided. By default, port 4443 is used.

Username and Password

To collect performance metrics from the target storage device, the eG agent should be configured with the credentials of a user who is vested with "read-only" privileges to access REST API of the target storage device. Specify the credentials of such a user in the Username and Password text boxes.

Confirm Password

Confirm the password by retyping it here.

Timeout Seconds

Specify the time duration for which this test should wait for a response from the storage system in the Timeout text box. By default, this is 60 seconds.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation

Is Protected

Indicates if the given storage pool is protected. This protects data to be read from unauthorized locations.

Boolean

 

Is cold storage enabled?

Indicates if the cold storage is enabled and infrequently accessed data is being archived.

Boolean

Data which is not accessed frequently is stored in cold storage. Transferring data in cold storage can improve the performance of reads and writes.

Nodes in the storage pool

Indicates the total number of nodes in the storage pool.

Number

 

Good nodes

Total number of nodes in the storage pool that are online.

Number

If there are not enough good nodes in storage pool, it will not be able to serve the read and write requests in responsive manner.

 

 

Bad nodes

Total number of offline nodes.

Number

Maintenance nodes

Indicates the number of nodes that are under maintenance at the time of measurement.

Number

Online nodes with sufficient disk space

Indicates the number of nodes where have disk space above the threshold.

Number

 

Number of disks

Indicates the total number of disks attached to all the nodes within the storage pool.

Number

 

Good disks

Indicates the number of online disks in the storage pool.

Number

 

Bad disks

Indicates the total number of offline disks.

Number

 

Maintenance disks

Indicates the number of disks that are under maintenance at the time of measurement.

Number

 

Total space

Indicates the total capacity of the storage pool that is currently online. This is the total of the capacity already used and the capacity still free for allocation.

GB

 

Free space

Indicates the free space in the storage pool across all disks which is online.

GB

 

Reserved space

Online capacity available for use, including approximately 10% of the total capacity that is reserved for failure handling and for performing erasure encoding or XOR operations.

GB

 

Geo copy

Indicates the capacity used for Geo-replication chunks stored on the current VDC.

GB

 

Geo cache

Indicates the capacity used to cache chunks that are accessed locally but not stored locally.

GB

 

System meta data

Indicates the capacity used by ECS processes that track and describe the data in the system. This capacity is not available to users for storage.

GB

 

User data

Indicates the capacity used by repository chunks representing data uploaded by ECS users.

GB

 

Allocated space

Indicates the total disk space allocated for storage including system metadata, user data, and geo copy data.

GB

 

Percentage of allocated space

Indicates the total allocated space as a percentage of the total online capacity on the storage pool.

Percentage

It is important measure to understand at what capacity the storage pool is operating. If the percentage is close to 100, then you can take