If you are a NetApp presales SE working for NetApp or a reseller, or simply an IT

consultant working onsite (customer) trying to procure & deploy a NetApp enterprise SAN

storage system as a part of an IT solution, one of the hardest things you’d have to do is
to figure out how big you’d need to make the SAN in order for it to last a decent while
without having to upgrade it to something bigger and better few months down the line. 
An accurate sizing is an extremely important part that you must pay enough attention
to upfront to scientifically finalise the size & the specification of your new SAN, based on
the workload your going to put on it. This is simply so that you procure a SAN storage
that’s fit for purpose from capacity & throughput perspective so you wont have to look at
adding additional nodes prematurely to your storage cluster too early in its life cycle.

Being involved as a channel SE, I go through this process day in and day out with my
customers and the hardest part that usually gets in the way of doing an accurate sizing
(apart from the impatient customer and the even more impatient sales guy who prefers
to use the art of guessing to quickly come up with a “SAN configs that he can quote
quickly for the customer”) is the lack of readily available storage statistics of the existing
environment or the inability to effectively gather these storage stats from a distributed IT
environment without laborious & time consuming tasks that involve lot of work with
spreadsheets (I can imagine all NetApp SE’s nodding their heads in agreement

right now   ). So far, a typical NetApp / Channel partner SE proposing a NetApp

SAN solution for a customer, who’s supposed to be doing it properly would have had to
ask the customer to provide storage stats for all of their estate (which almost always
does not exist) or deploy a rudimentary monitoring and statistics gathering tool
like virtualisation data collector (you need to be a NetApp partner with appropriate
access to click on the link) and do lot of manual spreadsheet related work to manipulate
the rudimentary data gathered before it can be fed in to SPM (NetApp’s official sizing
tool) to produce a valid SAN storage configs for the given requirement. Having done this
repeatedly myself for every single storage solution for my customers, I can say it has
been painful and often very time consuming.

Like me, if you are involved in lot of NetApp SAN storage sizing for various customers, 
you’d be really glad to know that there’s a new data collection tool been made
available called NetApp Lanamark (HPAS). NetApp Lanamark is a lightweight, agentless
data collector that is fundamentally very similar to how VMware capacity planner (and its
data collector) works. NetApp Lanamark lets you deploy a single data collector on to a
Windows server (could be a VM) and monitor and continuously collect resource
utilisation statistics (mainly storage) which is uploaded to a central repository online.
Once sufficient data has been collected, you can run an assessment (unlike VMware cap
planner assessment which is little complicated to actually get setup initially and
configure an assessment, all of that are automatically done for you, so all you really need
to do is to create groups of servers if required) and export the results in the form of a
JSON file that can directly be imported in to SPM (NetApp’s formal sizing tool) and voila…
you have an accurately sized SAN configuration that can be sent to the customer….Its
that simple.

Given below are some key points to note

 It is supported to collect performance stats from a variety of host system OS’s

such as (collecting data from none host systems such as arrays is not supported),
 o Most Windows versions

o Following Linux versions (CentOS 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, Debian 3.1, 4.0, 5.0,
Fedora 4 – 10, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 9.x, 10.x, openSUSE 10.x, 11.x,
Oracle Linux 4, 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, Ubuntu 6 and up)

o Though its officially not listed, when I trialled this, it successfully

connected to my ESXi (5.5) servers and collected data from them too. But note
that later on when you run the assessment, the stats for these servers seems to
get omitted (when I trialled this in my lab, it seemed to omit all the stats for the
ESXi hosts)

 Each collector can gather data from <=2500 servers / systems

 Stats collected are uploaded to a data warehouse server in US

 Only available to NetApp employees or Start and Platinum partner SE’s (everyone
else, you’d have to ask your NetApp SE to do this on your behalf)

 If you are a NetApp SE or a partner SE, more details can be found on the live
presentation that can be found here

I’ve attempted a simple assessment using my home lab and given below are the typical
setup steps involved.

 Go to https://lanamark.netapp.com and register a new opportunity (need a

NetApp NOW account to login with. NetApp SE’s, Distribution SEs, Platinum or Start
partner SE’s have rights to use this. If you are a different partner level, you need to
request the aligned NetApp SE to do this on your behalf. Your NetApp CDM or the
sales rep involved from NetApp in the opportunity also need to authorise the
assessment. Anyone with a @netapp.com email address could usually do this)