DPACK: Workload Concentration (WC)2016

Tech Briefing on how to leverage the new Workload Concentration features

Getting Data Insight
As DPACK progresses into its next generation offerings the goal will be to bringrapid visibility to areas of interest or concern within data captures.
DPACK itself is a Big Data and IoT project wrapped up in one as the collectors are
sending back hundreds of thousands of data points to the Online Analytics
Engine. Without the processing capabilities of this platform, these data points
would be nearly impossible to surface.

“Workload Concentration
is a stack ranking of disk
activity showing performance over capacity.

Introducing Workload Concentration
WC is a representation of the facts about server data. This is displayed in a waythat allows you to quickly see what drives [LUNs/Volumes] are creating the mostactivity in the environment as well as their ratio to overall data capacity.

It is not a sub-LUN or
sub-File heat mapping.”

Before going deeper into the data that WC shows, we need to understand a couple of key points so there is no misunderstanding as to what you are viewing.
Q: Does this predict tiering or sizing requirements?
A: No, this is simply a representation of the facts. It’s unrelated to any platforms
specific tiering or caching algorithms. However, the data does have meaningfulcorrelation to any device that stores capacity.
Q: Is this the same as Heat Mapping?
A: No, heat mapping would indicate sub-LUN or sub-File level knowledge of how“hot or cold” is a portion of the data. WC only deals with the disks themselves andtheir relationship to all other disks captured.

The Alternate Views
WC can be viewed in two different methods; Variable Step Graph or Bubble Chart.
Each show similar but slightly different information and depending on theenvironment captured one might work better than the other.
This document will walk through both variations and explain what is being shown,as well as what you should be interpreting.

Note: These graphs will not currently print in any PDF.

© 2016 Dell

In This Briefing

WC—New ways tosee dataWhat WC is not

What should you beinterpreting fromthese new graphicalviews

WC: Variable Width Step Graph
As DPACK collects the current environment it will understand the capacity and performance of each disk. In this document a disk will include any LUN, Volume, DataStore, or Internal Capacity that donates to the overall capacity figure determined by DPACK in the project summary.
WC is simply a plotting of the relationship of those disk’s performance (IOPS) over capacity. With the Variable Width Step
Graph, each disk is first sorted by it’s 95th percent IOPS number from highest to lowest. Each of those disks are thenplotted in a graph, much like the sample below, with the highest performing disks on the far left and the lowest performing disks on the far right.
Therefore, the height of each “Step” is representing the amount of IOPS in relation to all other steps.
Used Capacity of that disk is represented by the width of the step. The wider the step, the larger in capacity the disk.
The horizontal axis demonstrates all capacity from the environment. There is an arbitrary 20% capacity line drawn in thegraph for the purpose of creating a calculation of what amount of IOPS fall into what amount of capacity.

A Workload Concentration Example that shows a very high percentage of IOPS coming from less than 20% of overall capacity

WC’s Relationship to Tiering Value
Although WC is in no way a measure of how to size a tier in storage, WC is a great predictor of if the environment as acandidate for storage teiring in general. The graph shows a propensity model that demonstrates how hot certain disks arein relation to the rest of the environment.
The higher the concentration of IOPS from a smaller portion of data capacity, the more suited the environment is to datatiering. Likewise, the flatter or more evenly distributed this graph, the more suited the environment would be towards amonolithic or single tier design as performance is evenly distributed throughout capacity.
Since this graph has no knowledge of Sub-LUN level data tiering algorithms that would tier the LUN over multiple disk
types, one could assume that a highly concentrated environment would be even further optimized by this technology.
One could also make the argument that even flat graphs could benefit from Sub-LUN level tiering or caching algorithms.

Why Does this Graph Work
Most applications will have disk layouts designed to accommodate the specific workload by the administrator. For example, many higher IOPS disks are associated with a database or log files which might require much smaller capacity thanother workloads that have much lower IO to capacity ratios, such as a File Server.
This view will give you a visual of how the application owners have provisioned storage in relationship to workloads.

© 2016 DellWC: Bubble Graph
The WC bubble graph might be more appropriately named the “Workload Characterization” graph, due to it representing
more than just performance over capacity. The Bubble graph shares the same data represented in the Variable Width
Step Graph, but leverages a Bubble chart which can show a 4th attribute. In this case that attribute is Quality of Service orsimply the average latency of the disk’s IOPS.
The WC Bubble Graph is simply a plotting of the relationship of all disk’s performance (IOPS) over capacity and their propensity to be a problem factor in the environment. Each disk is first sorted by it’s 95th percent IOPS number from highest
to lowest. Each of those disks are then plotted in a graph, much like the sample below, with the highest performing disks
in the far upper left and the lowest performing disks in the far bottom right.
Therefore, the height of each bubble is representing the amount of IOPS in relation to all other bubbles.
Capacity of that disk is represented by the size of the bubble. The larger the bubble the higher in capacity the disk.
The horizontal axis demonstrates all capacity from the environment.
The additional attribute of Quality of Service is introduced by the color indicator assigned to each bubble. Green is ahealthy average latency, yellow represents a potential area of concern, and red indicates a disk that potentially needs tobe inspected. By no means are these colors a predictor of a problem. They are just a visual indicator of the facts.

A Workload Concentration Bubble Example that shows many disks with varying average response times

Researching a Potential Problem
Both the Step Graph and the Bubble Chart will become more insightful when the project has a higher number of disks.
The WC Bubble chart can be particularly problematic if the environment has over a hundred disks or has little variation in
the performance of each bubble. As seen in the example above, when there are many similar performing bubbles thegraph can produce a “snake” like effect which makes it hard to isolate a bubble. To gain visibility to dense regions of bubbles the chart can be zoomed with the graph controls below the chart.
Each bubble can be “hovered over” to see the disk name, performance, capacity, and the server that owns the disk. Thebubbles are also interactive. If you click on any bubble the left hand tree navigation will automatically expand and locate
the position of the disk in the tree menu. Once the disk of interest has been located you can use the other available graphdata to investigate other performance attributes.
Bubbles marked with a gray color represent a disk that does less than 100 IOPS in either reads or writes. Low IO disks canskew latency averages and these disks can be ignored. You can read more on the DPACK support site:
https://dpacksupport.dell.com/entries/78846377© 2016 DellUnderstanding more about DPACKThe DPACK team is happy to conduct team or territory level training with
employees, partners, or End Users.
Our contact information can be found on the right in the blue column!
The DPACK site is located at https://DPACK2.Dell.com
The DPACK support site is located at https://DPACKSupport.dell.com or byemailing support@dpack.zendesk.com
The DPACK support site also has a vast library of other insightful attributes ofDPACK and can be located here:
https://dpacksupport.dell.com/forums

Contact Us
The DPACK team can becontacted at the following
address:
DPACKsupport.dell.com
General Manager:
Sam Kirchoff
NA:
Scott DesBles
Mike Bachman
EMEA:
Uwe Wiest
LatAM:
Alan Rabinovich
APJ:
Mike Bachman

DPACK: Know Your Load!

© 2016 Dell