Release Notes

14 Analyzing Dell PS Series Storage with SAN Headquarters | TR1050
2 Using SAN HQ to find performance bottlenecks
SAN HQ is designed to help identify hardware bottlenecks within the PS Series infrastructure. Many factors should be
considered when troubleshooting or isolating the root cause. Hardware issues or misconfigurations should be
identified and eliminated first.
The Dell Storage PS Series is well suited for highly virtualized iSCSI connected environments. Configure the network
according to Dell best practices for PS Series iSCSI networks. More information is available in the PS Series
Configuration Guide.
PS Series arrays provide a virtualized architecture which enables maximum utilization over all disks in the pool.
Volumes will spread across the pool boundary of disks and provide for the aggregate I/O and capacity.
SAN HQ exposes the different layers of virtualization and helps maximize resource utilization and troubleshoot
bottlenecks.
2.1 General performance considerations
There are several opportunities for performance issues within data processing infrastructures. Hosts may have
processor or memory saturation limits. Applications may have long running queries or low tolerance for latency. When
focusing on the hardware and virtualized stack, the most crucial component is the application’s ability to access data.
That data may reside on mechanical spinning disks, which in comparison has a significantly higher access time than the
servers’ main memory (DDR RAM). The relationship of access to different hardware stores is generally illustrated in
Figure 7.