Intelligent Capacity Management Services (ICM)

In today’s data center environments supported by storage virtualization, the storage system’s ability to automatically expand the virtual disk space to accommodate file system growth is one of the key IT requirements for continuous data center operation.

The data center administrator needs to provide 24x7 availability of data and adequate storage space. Costly downtime caused by “file system full” or “out of disk space” is to be avoided. To achieve the goals of continuous system uptime and storage availability, the data center administrator needs access to file system information, such as file and directory tree attributes, file system storage usage and the underlying virtual disk partition utilization characteristics. These are all critical information required for file system management and virtual disk space maintenance.

With traditional small server data growth, as new servers and disks are added to the network, users experience interruptions in their regular service. This interruption will have severe business impact if access to company’s data is not available during business hours. iQstor Intelligent Capacity Management Services (ICM) offers uninterrupted virtual storage provisioning and automatic file system expansion.

Features and Functions
Working in tandem with operating system specific agents, iQstor Storage Virtualization Services (SVS), iQstor Storage Management Services and user-defined policies for file system size limits, ICM offers the small and mid-size businesses a non-disruptive process to gain information about operating system specific file systems and automate virtual disk expansion on a file system basis. The intelligent policy-based management component of ICM allows the data center administrator to set certain thresholds for the file system size, as well as a set of policies for growing the file system automatically when the threshold is reached. ICM eliminates the costly downtime associated with re-building and re-formatting operating system partitions due to unforeseen storage requirements.

Reporting File System Information
ICM scans all active Vdisk (Virtual disk) volumes and provides partition and file system layout information through the iQstor Storage Management Software to the IT administrator. ICM examines boot sector records and provides information about partition tables, magic numbers, checksums and various file system data structures that include meta-data and system files.

Automatic Expansion of Virtual Disk Space to Accommodate File System Growth
ICM is a policy-based capacity management feature which through continuous monitoring of storage consumption, prevents the system from running out of storage space. When a Vdisk needs to be expanded, ICM provisions more capacity from one of the storage pools without interrupting the operation of the application servers, eliminating costly downtime associated with traditional physical disk upgrades.

Recognized operating systems and file types include: SUN Solaris, UFS file system Win2K, NTFS file system