MonoSphere Storage Horizon^® 3.0 provides Global 3000 companies a unified view of current and projected storage capacity usage, which enables IT organizations to develop effective storage capacity plans, maximize utilization of existing storage assets and significantly reduce capital expenditures on IT storage.  New analytical tools automate the previously manual process of matching storage demand with physical storage inventory, enabling enterprises to more fully leverage existing hardware assets.

"Mapping storage usage from application hosts down to the storage array is critical functionality that is long overdue," said Arun Taneja, consulting analyst and founder of the Taneja Group.  "Now enterprises can make better purchasing decisions based on how much of their storage is used versus how much has been allocated for use, which is how most organization manage storage capacity today."

Storage Horizon 3.0 Adds Innovative Features

MonoSphere's Storage Horizon enables storage administrators to make informed storage infrastructure decisions about how and when to consolidate storage, increase utilization, add new subsystems, understand the impact of data protection schemes, reclaim under-utilized storage and prevent out-of-storage emergencies.  Storage Horizon 3.0 is a comprehensive management application for capacity forecasting, capacity budgeting, storage analytics, supply-to-demand mapping and daily usage monitoring.  New features include:

• Data collection and reporting from storage arrays

• Automated supply-to-demand mapping of storage array logical devices to host volumes

• Automated association of usage and usage forecasts to storage arrays

• Automated, storage-array-based capacity plan generation

• 20 template-based analytical reports, in addition to more than 500 custom reports

• Alerts for potential "trouble spots" and over-provisioned areas

As with previous versions, Storage Horizon 3.0 does not require installation of software agents on application servers, so the system deploys in hours and collects storage usage data immediately.

See for yourself how Storage Horizon 3.0 can lower your storage CapEx and ease the burden of managing your rapidly growing storage infrastructure by viewing the

Storage Horizon on-line demo:

http://www.monosphere.com/cgi/register2.pl?file=Storage_Horizon_Flash_Web_Demo.html

Storage Horizon 3-minute movie:

http://www.monosphere.com/movie/index.html

Storage Horizon product white paper:

http://www.monosphere.com/PDFs/storage_horizon_WP.pdf

You're at home, enjoying a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and suddenly your cell phone rings.  One of the company's important applications is about of run out of storage, so you need to go into the office and provision more space.  Most of today's Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions will alert you when usage hits a critical threshold, but unless you make that threshold unrealistically low, it's already too late to avoid an out of storage emergency.  Other than turning off your cell phone, how can you avoid these types of situations in the future?

The answer is to manage storage capacity with usage forecasts.  If you follow these steps, you are sure to avoid those dreaded out of storage emergencies:

1. Measure your "storage lead time", which is the amount of calendar time it takes to get new storage provisioned.

2. Generate usage forecasts for every application host volume and LUN in your environment.

3. Determine your "reach threshold dates", which is the date when the usage forecasts will intersect with your critical thresholds for each volume and LUN.

4. Determine your "provision before dates" by subtracting your storage lead time from the reach threshold dates.

5. By provisioning the appropriate amount of storage on your provision before dates, you should eliminate your out of storage emergencies.

For mid to large sized shops, performing steps one to four manually would be too time consuming, so automating these tasks is highly recommended.

A recent survey conducted by MonoSphere reveals 83 percent of 140 storage professionals face an increase in capital expenditures on storage.  41 percent of the total cited that storage spending is skyrocketing or increasing faster than the overall IT budget.  As a result, 62 percent of respondents say that increased spending causes a financial problem for their organization, often delaying the implementation of other IT projects. This number escalated to 87 percent – more than two thirds – when the dataset was narrowed to include only executives titled director level and above who manage more than 100 terabytes of stored data.  Also among the smaller dataset, responses reveal that 36 percent had to delay other IT projects due to the increase in storage expenditures.

The survey represented 140 total respondents in the IT industry.  Organizations varied in storage size from less than 99 TBs to 1 PB or greater.