Unique to the Storage Horizon solution is its ability to determine current and predict future storage array usage (the amount of storage that contains application or end-user data) through its agent-less server, application and storage system data collection, association, and predictive analytics processes.  These processes are critical to effectively managing storage capacity in today's heterogeneous environments, and provide compelling customer benefits such as:

·         Allowing users to grow existing capacity without purchasing additional storage by automatically developing optimized storage capacity plans.

·         Offering comprehensive information on the storage environment, current usage, usage growth rates, and forecasted usage.

·         Identifying dark storage that can be re-directed to areas in need of additional capacity.

·         Pinpointing over-provisioned areas, so wasted storage can be reclaimed.

·         Providing early warning of potential over-utilization issues before they become out-of-storage emergencies.

As a result, Storage Horizon can decrease storage capital expenditures by as much as 50 percent, and drastically reduce operational expenditures such as power, cooling and data center floor space.

To learn how the Storage Horizon solution can lower your storage CapEx and ease the burden of managing your rapidly growing storage infrastructure, view the information below:

Storage Horizon On-line Demo

Storage Horizon 3-Minute Movie

Storage Horizon Product White Paper

IT departments looking to dramatically improve utilization and cut storage CapEx should take a close look at the cost-effective, innovative SURE (Systematic, Usage-based Regimen for Enterprises) storage capacity management system. What makes SURE storage capacity management the best choice for multi-vendor enterprise environments is its ability to determine current and predict future storage array usage (the amount of storage that contains application or end-user data) through its agent-less server, application and storage system data collection, association, and predictive analytics processes.  SURE storage capacity management consists of the following integrated steps:

·         Collect storage-related information from storage systems (storage inventory) and application hosts (storage usage) without the use of agents.

·         Associate host volumes with storage subsystem logical devices (LUNs), including consideration for thin provisioning, host virtualization, RAID protection levels, snapshots, and replication, at both host and storage subsystems. This enables the determination of true usage of each logical device and the overall array.

·         Baseline current utilization and develop future utilization targets.

·         Forecast future usage and utilization for each volume, database, file system, and logical device after a number of collections have been completed.  These forecasts should be saved in a database for further analysis and planning.

·         Analyze current and projected storage consumption and supply details.

·         Plan for future provisioning and purchases by developing a storage capacity plan to optimize what to buy, when to buy it, and where to deploy it.

·         Provision storage per the plan, using hardware vendor or user-generated tools.

·         Enterprise-Wide Monitoring of storage capacity on a daily basis ensures that changes in storage consumption don't cause emergencies.

SURE storage capacity management has the following advantages over traditional methods.

·         Allocation-Based Storage Capacity Management

With millions of dollars of storage hardware, it is extremely inaccurate and wasteful for enterprises to assume that allocated storage is 100 percent used.  Here's why. Storage administrators allocate storage to consumers based on how much they ask for - without knowing if the requests are too much, too little, or will meet storage consumption demands for weeks, months, quarters, or in fact, years into the future. This process assumes that allocated LUNs will be 100 percent claimed, assigned, and used (which has been shown to be highly inaccurate).  When the un-allocated pool of storage starts to dwindle, additional storage is purchased to replenish the pool to fulfill future requests.  Analysis of real production environments conducted by MonoSphere found that overall utilization (used / raw storage) is 30 percent, and utilization of allocated storage (used / allocated storage) is only slightly better at 36 percent.

·         Server-Based Storage Capacity Management

Some storage teams have spent significant time, money, and sanity deploying and maintaining SRM agents on each of their application servers to collect information from the application server volumes in their environment. From this information, storage teams can determine how much data is written to each application server volume and then makes an assumption that the utilization of the storage systems is equal to the "utilization" of the application server volumes.  MonoSphere has found that storage system utilization is typically less than half of application server "utilization".  Therefore, reporting the usage of application server volumes is not only insufficient to manage large storage environments, but many times can provide misleading data.

For more information on how SURE storage capacity management can help you and your business succeed, please download the SURE Storage Capacity Management white paper.