Precise for Storage

“Precise for Database & Storage enables customers to optimize enterprise flash drive deployment for maximum business transaction throughout in EMC Symmetrix® and CLARiiON® storage environments. The exceptional performance of our enterprise flash drive solutions can now be accurately assigned to the service of specific critical businesses.” — Peter Conway - Vice President of Symmetrix Business and Products Operations, EMC

Optimize storage performance by the business priorities

For many critical applications, retrieving data from storage subsystems represents the largest percentage of transaction response time. Unfortunately, understanding the role that storage plays in performance degradation is notoriously difficult to assess. Hence storage is often blamed when performance problems occur.

Provisioning storage for applications is complex and expensive. Critical data should be pushed into faster and more expensive storage components (such as EFD), whereas non-critical data should be pushed into slower and less expensive storage components (such as SATA). Identifying the critical and less-critical pieces of data is difficult. Relying on Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) alone is not sufficient, as IOPS tells you nothing about the business priority.

Clearly, a solution is needed that would tie the business priorities to the storage performance, facilitating fast performance for the critical business transactions, while keeping costs down.

Precise helps EMC customers optimize storage for both cost and performance.

Solution Benefits

Precise's solution for EMC provides unprecedented visibility deep into storage, allowing customers to:

• correlate application and database activity with files, volumes, logical storage devices, pools and disks they access
  
  
• automatically detect disk and pool contention and provide actionable advice to eliminate it by moving files to a new device
  
  
• push past performance symptoms which paint storage as the culprit and drill into the real root cause-whether it lies in the application tier, overloaded database servers, inefficient SQL, or poor database design
  
  
• accurately predict the performance impact of tiering data on either EFD's or SATA, and automatically recommend data assignment to either tier
  
  
• receive actionable advice and recommendations to accelerate performance problem resolution
  
  
• perform "what-if" testing to assess impact and reduce risk before any changes are made
  
  
• enable storage tiering strategies based on real business priority. These strategies can be on a per-database, per-SQL query, or even a per-business transaction level of granularity.