Excuse the absence in both presence and posts. It’s been a roller-coaster past year with personal injury and flat-out work schedules, so I have had little time or motivation to blog or show my face around the communities. My apologies, and I am determined to break this habit and get back into things once again! But enough of the chatter, get on with the writings…

This isn’t something I see very often, but when I do, it’s interesting to see the stats speak for themselves. I’m with a customer who had a scripted deployment of their NetApp estate a few years ago, and it wasn’t designed or delivered with too much care or attention (something I want to discuss another day). They have a VMware estate with SQL, Exchange and other things. It all runs across a total of over 100 15k FC spindles. It’s not a huge estate in comparison with other sites, so I’m intrigued into why they have such performance issues.

Now when you run through “sysstat –u”, you can see that the filer itself is doing very little, quite happily getting on with what it should do. But the disk is hitting 100% quite often. Immediately this shows a disk problem. They need more spindles, obviously?

Firstly there is an imbalance of spindles. They have a second aggregate on the partner controller that only has test volumes. I get permission to remove this and hot, I re-allocate these to the other controller and expand the existing aggregate. This doubles the spindle count, but I know it’s not going to do anything for existing performance (in that the data won’t automatically redistribute itself!).  Read more... (799 words, estimated 3:12 mins reading time)