I have a 6 TB SAN with 14 servers attached, and was wondering if anyone knows of a best practice for how much free space (percentage or quantity) should be left available for emergency use. Any references would be great.
What is your definition of emergency use and what would you use it for? I have just installed a 110 TB SAN Disk solution for a customer and they are using every possible byte of the disk. I do not see a need for an emergency space in a SAN environment unless you are not protected.
To me, the emergency use is an admin comes to me and says they need 100 GB because they just ran out of disk space and the auditors have asked for a second copy of the database.
If an auditor or customer asks for more space, in most worlds this is not an emergency. It sounds like you need more of a capacity planning issue. I would trend your storage back to 2 years ago and up to 3 years in the future so you will be able to see the possible growth that you will endure.
It depends,
If your infrastructure is stable (i.e. not growing abnormally or adding new servers all of the time) then you should have minimal spare space (in your example <100GB)
But if your infrastructure is changing/growing then it is nice to have a 5% head room to allow for any 'emergency' work.
But try getting the buyers to buy that extra 5% just for emergencies? . .not much chance...
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