We recently turned on FAST on one of our EMC VMAX arrays and I was curious as to how much data was moving.  I didn’t have an easy way to see what percentage of data changes from day to day,  let alone hour to hour.  Getting the current data is actually really easy using symtier -sid <sid> list -vp,  but I wanted something to view historical information.  So I whipped up a quick perl script which will parse the output of symtier and recode it in a CSV format for importing into Excel. You can download it here:

It’s really simple,  just run the script and pass it a sid and the path/name of a file to record to.. and it does the rest.  Like so:

[box]mark@shell# ./record.pl 1234 ./tier_usage.csv[/box]

A few second later you’ll see the information in the file you specify.  Now for the historical part you’ll need to setup a crontab entry which runs this script as often as your like. You can his throw this into excel, or anything else,  track..trend..and report..  Works like a charm!