Planning the storage capacity you need is sometimes like a blind-folded partygoer pinning the tail on a donkey - it’s a hit or miss proposition.

Many storage administrators allocate storage capacity by application – if they have an Exchange message store running on a Windows host, they will allocate XX amount of storage to it. When the message store starts filling up the disk, they’ll start the process of obtaining more storage.

They may make those storage acquisition decisions via some mental scribbling or with the help of manually-produced spreadsheets, both of which can cause unpredictable results. To avoid running out of capacity, often they over-provision storage.

MonoSphere, a storage start-up, introduced software in 2005 that monitors and measures storage allocation. The software can look at an application and the storage allocated to it and predict when a customer should buy more storage.

Predicting storage capacity by application at first seems to be a good idea. In a survey of 366 Oracle users 60% reported that their database performance was hindered by a lack of available storage and 46% said that database availability was affected by storage capacity.

Basing storage capacity on application allocation alone though can lead to unwise storage acquisition, especially if the storage allocated is underutilized.

The company’s new software, Storage Horizon 3.0 now views the volumes on the application hosts and maps or correlates them to the storage assigned (LUN) to them. It can show how much storage is being used of the storage allocated to an application.

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Storage in the news in the past week:

The Storage Networking Industry Association announced last week that its Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) has gained International Standards Organization approval.

For a little humor, watch Hitachi Data Systems’ virtualization video clip on YouTube. It’s all about virtualization in the controller and not the network, and turns storage administrators into ‘mindless drones,’ who are virtualized the Hitachi-way.

ProStor Systems, a developer of removable disk storage systems, announced the launch of a Web site, RDXstorage.com, which carries news of vendors that make RDX drives for small and midsize businesses.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.