Evaluating your storage needs

Note: The information on this page only applies if you use in-cluster storage. If you use an Azure storage account, AWS S3, or other S3 compatible storage, you do not need this.

An Automation Suite cluster uses the objectstore disks attached to its server nodes as storage resources available to all the products enabled on your cluster. Each product uses these resources differently.

To understand your storage needs and plan for them accordingly, refer to the following terminology and guidelines.

Terminology

• Server node disk size – The size of all individual disks attached to each server node.

  • Disks on each server may have different sizes as long as the sum of all the disk sizes is identical on all servers.
• Total cluster disk size – Server node disk size multiplied by the number of server nodes.

• Application available storage – The amount of storage available for applications to consume.

  • Application available storage is lower than the total storage attached. This is to ensure we have a higher resiliency to fault tolerance and high availability.

The following table describes the multi-node HA-ready hardware requirements for the Complete product selection in the context of the previously introduced terms.

Number of server nodes	Server node disk size	Total cluster disk size	Application available storage
3	512 GiB	1.5 TiB	512 GiB

Estimating the storage used by your applications

As you enable and use products on the cluster, they consume some storage from the application available storage. Products usually have a small enablement footprint as well as some usage-dependent footprint that varies depending on the use case, scale of use, and project. The storage consumption is evenly distributed across all the storage resources (data disks), and you can monitor the levels of storage utilization using the Automation Suite monitoring stack.

How to monitor available storage

You will receive an alert with a warning when the storage consumption exceeds 75%. You will receive another critical alert when the storage consumption exceeds 85%; in this case, the storage will be read-only.

How to increase storage capacity

If your evaluated needs do not meet the recommended hardware requirements, you can add more storage capacity using either one or both of the following methods:

1. You have to add a new disk on all the server nodes of same size.
2. To configure the disk, see our docs.

How to calculate your usage needs

You can estimate your storage consumption using the product-specific metric in the following tables. These tables describe how much content you can place on your cluster out of the box. For reference, they include the storage footprint of a typical usage scenario of each product.

Product	Storage-driving metric	Storage per metric	Typical use case
Shared suite capabilities	Application logs	N/A	Typically, 7 days of application logs is around 25 GiB.
Orchestrator	Size of the automation packages for deployed automations Size of the storage buckets of deployed automation	MiB per package MiB per bucket	Typically, a package is 5 MiB, and buckets, if any, are less than 1 MiB. A mature enterprise has 5 GiB of packages and 6 GiB of buckets deployed.
Action Center	Number of documents stored by customer in document tasks Number of tasks created	GiB per document in document tasks Number of tasks	Typically, a document takes 0.15 MiB, and the forms to fill take an additional 0.15 KiB. In a mature enterprise this can roll up to 4 GiB in total.
Test Manager	Number of attachments and screenshots stored by users	Mb of attachments and screenshots	Typically, all files and attachments add up to approximately 5 GiB.
Insights	Enablement footprint and the number of dashboards published	GiB per dashboard	2 GiB are required for enablement, with the storage footprint growing with the number. A well-established enterprise-scale deployment requires another few GiB for all the dashboards.
Automation Hub	N/A	N/A	2 GiB fixed footprint
Automation Ops	N/A	N/A	No storage footprint
Apps	Number of apps deployed and enablement footprint	Number of apps, size of apps, size of database supporting apps	Typically, the database takes approximately 5 GiB, and a typical complex app consumes approximately 15 MiB.
AI Center	Number of uploaded ML packages Number of datasets for analysis Number of published pipelines	GiB per package GiB per dataset Number of pipelines	A typical and established installation will consume 8 GiB for 5 packages and an additional 1GiB for the datasets. A pipeline may consume an additional 50 GiB, but only when actively running.
Document Understanding	Size of ML model Size of OCR model Number of stored documents	GiB per ML model GiB per OCR model Number of documents stored	In a mature deployment, 12GiB will go to ML model, 17GiB to the OCR, and 50GiB to all documents stored.
Task Mining	Hours of user activity analyzed to suggest automation patterns	GiB per hour	Typically, about 200GiB of activity log data should be analyzed to suggest meaningful automations. Highly repetitive tasks however, may require much less data.
Process Mining	the number of events in millions the case and event fields	the number of events in millions x the number of case and event fields x 0.02 GiB	Minimal footprint only used by users uploading data via the Process Mining portal. Approximately 10 GiB of storage should be enough in the beginning.