When adding workloads to the Unity system, consider the reported CPU utilization rates as well as the capacity and IOP sizing.  Brief spikes of high utilization are normal and expected on any Unity system. The Dell EMC Unity: Best Practices Guide provides details on sustained CPU utilization and recommended operating ranges that influence whether the system can accept additional workloads.

In highly consolidated environments, HANA, as well as other databases and applications, competes for storage resources. The “host I/O limits” quality of service (QoS) feature can be used to control noisy neighbors and protect the HANA production system performance.

Host I/O limits

The ability to limit the number of IOPS serviced by the Unity system is known as host I/O limits. Host I/O limits can be applied on LUNs, VMware vStorage VMFS datastores, and their associated snapshots. Use host I/O limits to limit incoming host activity on the basis of IOPS, bandwidth, or both. You can enforce limits on individual resources, or you can share a limit  among a set of resources.

Host I/O limits can be effective in consolidated environments if an overload on the storage resources affects the performance of more critical applications, such as SAP HANA production installations. To protect the performance of SAP HANA production systems, consider configuring host I/O limits on LUNs, datastores of non-SAP HANA applications, or SAP HANA nonproduction systems to limit the total IOPs or bandwidth, which might otherwise consume a large portion of the system’s resources.