PRO+ Premium Content/Storage

Business pressures outside the data center could lead to hasty decisions within, such as too quickly zeroing in on the cause of a storage performance slowdown. Hastiness could lead you to upgrade your storage network to all-new, faster connections, only to discover later that you haven't solved anything. Why? Because, as it turned out, the real problem was latency caused by having too many servers banging on the system, rather than the speed of any individual connection. Measuring application performance from end to end, preferably with a system that does historical tracking, is the only real way to discern exactly what's causing a slowdown. You collect data over days, weeks or months to see how it's moving over time, which can identify periodic spikes from regular events -- from users logging in at 8 a.m. to weekly backups at midnight -- and identify traffic consumption trends. That way, in addition to zeroing in on what's negatively impacting storage today, you can detect trends and potential future problems, and maybe even ...