DS8000 SGC Monitoring, Reporting and Management with Manual and Auto Control

We are utilizing Safeguarded Copy across all of our Production environments. As the capability grows, so do the requirements in terms of capacity and performance. Regarding changes in capacity needs based on host activity or change in algorithm of backups, we tend to see issues regarding failed backups or devices meeting their maximum threshold of capacity, multipliers. Today, it is a manual process to gather data from the DS8K, edit the data in excel to add metrics that tell us what SGC devices are at particular percentages of threshold, picking a maximum value of 60% and manually running scripts on the DS8K to "expand" SGC devices. This does not help avoid issues with failing backups or devices that breach because this is when the DS8K really notifies us that we have an issue, usually after the fact. We realize that development of some sort of management of this process is being developed in GDPS, however, we feel this is not the best approach. GDPS does not manage all of our environments and this same sort of management would need to be available to all SGC environments. Additionally, since the problem is reported on the DS8K and then initially corrected on the DS8K, we again feel that the management, reporting and monitoring should be conducted on the DS8K. Looking at how EasyTier is managed on the DS8K, it seems reasonable that SGC could utilize the reporting that is already contained on the DS8K today and monitor and mange the environment via a EasyTier like facility on the backend of the DS8K. Something like this would allow us to manage all types of replication managed environments and ensure that we have appropriate views into the performance and management of the SGC environment.