Monitoring the Hitachi VSP Gx00 Series

eG Enterprise offers a specialized Hitachi VSP monitoring model that monitors the Hitachi VSP device inside-out, and promptly alerts administrators to issues affecting their performance, so that the required remedial action can be taken before its too late.

Figure 1 : The layer model of the Hitachi VSP storage device

Every layer is mapped to variety of tests to collect metrics from the storage device. These metrics enable administrators to find quick and accurate answers to the following performance queries:

• Is the storage device available over the network?
• Are the critical hardware components of the device, such as – battery, cache, controller, drive, fan, processor, power supply, shared memory - are operating normally?
• Are all the RAID stores of the storage device functioning without a glitch? Is any RAID store experiencing a hardware failure currently? Which RAID store is it, and which is the hardware component that is malfunctioning - is it the battery, the fan, the processor, cache, drive, shared memory, or power supply point?
• Is I/O load balanced across all the ports in SAN environment? Has any port been over-used?
• Which port is slow in responding to I/O requests?
• Are the channel, disk, and DRR processors on the storage device being utilized optimally?
• Do the caches have adequate memory space for storing data written to them, or are too many writes pending to the cache?
• How are the cache memory to cache switch access paths utilized? Is any path choking currently?
• Is the I/O load uniformly balanced across the logical volumes, LUNs, and parity groups on the storage device? Are any of these components over-utilized currently? Which one is it?