In response to a few questions that came up, I put together a video that shows how to do a cool trick with Microsoft Excel to create graphs of PowerVault MD3000i array-level performance data. I posted an entry here last week and also put up a wiki page about how you can use the smCLI command line tool to get array-level performance data (Individual storage processors, array totals, and individual virtual disks) from a PowerVault MD3000i. The output of this command is a csv (comma separated values) text file. I included on the wiki page a nice graph of the performance based on the data from this output file. What I didn't go into was how to create such a graph.

So now you have this great little video that will show you one way that you can use Excel to create a graph based on the data in the file. I don't claim to be a know-it-all when it comes to Excel, but the way that I do it in the video works. I would love to hear from anybody who knows of other (possibly better) ways to do it.

Todd