My Network Storage ate my capacity

I love Networked Storage, whether its Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a Storage Area Network (SAN). They have their pros and cons which I will not go into here. As I have written about before, I run lots and lots of Data Warehouses and they are a pain in the bottom for many reasons. In some ways a bit like owning a super car like a Ferrari

• Their initial cost of ownership is very high
• The older they get the less valuable they are, but you will never sell them
• They are often in the shop for expensive maintenance which always takes much longer than the technician told you it would
• Often are found is a fetching red color
  

Ok so I'm stretching it here a little. Big warehouses are painful to backup and restore so I love Network Storage, mostly because they have cool Snapshot and Replication technology. All the vendors are different, some better than others. However, they all suffer from the same problem. Whilst they can do smart things at the storage layer (e.g. just replicate blocks that have changed), for me as a DBA, sometimes a backup take a long time and sometimes it don't. I chosoe backup, but it could be just about any operation. It just not obvious until I try it and then cross my fingers that I'm going to meet my SLA. Bang, the SLA gun went off again.

Well fear not, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. I spoke to a rather nerdy group of developers at the W- Hotel after a long day at Oracle Open World in November. They promised the world (well after a free cocktail I was listening, well kind of). They said their "open Beta" was running and they could

• Analyze an Oracle database
• Provide on-line analytics of growth and change rates
• And for me the killer application, show me how much space I could save over time with Thin Provisioning and other storage tricks
  

So, by the time I got back from Oracle Open World I had forgotten the flyers, free cocktails and the (rather nice) free t-shirt they gave me. Not sure what plucked my interest (Oh I know, another dead database that need recovery because the storage admin had not keep up with the storage consumption)... so I tried it out and it actually seems to work. Who are these people?

MyVirtual-Lab.com. So if you are inclined to give a bunch of Mission District (I'm guessing here) hipsters a spin you might start getting some decent answers to life, the universe and everything... well at least find out when your database will run out of space.

Speaking to them at Oracle Open World, they said they are working on a VMware, Viridian and Xen Capacity Planning tool. If its anything like their Database tools, it will be very sweet indeed.