Oncommand Insight Infinidat Infinibox Storage Pool Capacity

[ruby hill]

We are trying to report on Used Capacities on our Inifinidat arrays.

Infinidats Element Manager reports: Physical Allocated 224.27 TB
Insight Reports: 208,767.4 GB

How is Insight coming up with this value?
How can I explain the difference?

From Insight:
Type:
Thin provisioning
Node:
node-1
Uses Flash Pool:
No
Redundancy:
InfiniRAID 14+2
Capacity:
31.37% (208,767.4 / 665,600.0 GB)
Over-Committed Capacity:
0%
Snapshot:
N/A
Utilization:
N/A
IOPS:
N/A
Throughput:
N/A

I am puzzled. When I look at the Infindat array I see the following values:
pool.query --detailed
Name 6000SAS_GP
State NORMAL
Type STANDARD
Physical Total 714.68 TB
Physical Allocated 224.27 TB
Physical Free 490.41 TB
Virtual Total 714.68 TB
Virtual Allocated 665.21 TB
Virtual Free 49.48 TB
Emergency Buffer UNLIMITED
Used Emergency Buffer -
Warning Threshold 80%
Critical Threshold 90%
Volumes QoS Policy -
Compressed yes
Data Reduction 1.18 : 1
SSD Cache Default yes
Filesystems QoS Policy -

[hollow schooner]

Hey Tony,

It looks to me like the Infinibox reports capacities in Base 10 for some reason. This isn't super common across platforms as it's typically reserved for 'as advertised' purposes to give users a simpler understanding of capacity. I can only think of a handful, but nonetheless there are platforms that do it.

All of that said, the vast majority of systems report capacity in Base 2. Both OCI and CI report values in Base 2 as that's the IEC standard. If there is a data collector which reports capacities in Base 10, the figure will be converted properly back down to bytes, and presented in Base 2 instead. This helps normalize capacity reporting across a heterogeneous environment so you are comparing apples to apples, so to speak.

For example, if I take the Storage Pool Total Capacity of 665,600 GB (GiB if we want to be specific, but I can't think of anyone that says 'Gibibyte' or willingly types GiB to denote the difference) - Cloud Insights and OnCommand Insight would report this figure in TB as 650 TB (TiB), but if you were to present that in Base 10 instead it would amount to 714.68 TB. It so happens that is exactly what shows up in the Physical Total field of your command line output from the Infinibox itself. Likewise, an Used Capacity figure of 208,767.4 GB (GiB) would in Base 2 be presented as 203.87 TB (TiB), but in Base 10 would be presented as 224.16 TB. That 224.16 is exceptionally close to the figure in your CLI output - enough that we are likely looking at the difference between the time you ran the command vs the last time OCI finished an inventory cycle on the storage system.

To sum it up - it looks like the capacity reporting is correct, there is just a nuance here that the Infinibox does not report capacity using IEC published standard so OCI converts it accordingly.