Storage Horizon
Overview
While it’s a best practice for large IT organizations to have
capacity management processes in place for service levels and to control
costs for networks and servers, such a dedicated, systematic process
has been sorely missing for one of the fastest growing components of
the IT infrastructure – storage. Even though the unit price of
storage continues to decline 25 percent annually, exponential growth
of storage consumption by applications, compliance requirements and
data-protection strategies are driving storage demand to increase by
50 percent or more per year. This has resulted in 10-15 percent annual
increases in storage expenditures. As is probably the case in your
company, storage expenses are growing faster than the IT budget and
have become a financial burden that can delay the rollout of major
company initiatives.
So, the problem isn’t paying too much for storage. The real problem
is paying for too much storage, too soon and too often. Without a systematic
storage capacity management process in place, it’s been nearly
impossible to accurately determine your storage utilization and subsequently
your true storage needs. As a result, most storage administrators significantly
overprovision storage to avoid shortages. Based on numerous petabytes
of production data analyzed by MonoSphere, this has resulted in wasteful
average storage utilization of 30 percent. Such poor utilization has
created an enormous opportunity to achieve greater value from existing
storage assets, while delivering extraordinary CapEx and OpEx savings
year in and year out. In today’s Global 3000 companies, the savings
can quickly reach tens of millions of dollars.
Creating such a huge financial impact is surprisingly simple with MonoSphere’s
Storage Horizon storage capacity management software. Agent-less, easy
to deploy and extremely cost-effective, MonoSphere’s Storage Horizon
automates your storage capacity management processes by providing an
unprecedented, unified view of current and projected storage capacity
usage. These processes provide:
- Capacity Planning - Forecast the
right amount of physical storage growth, to be added at the right
time, for the right locations in the infrastructure.
- Capacity Budgeting - Enable IT to
implement disciplined supply chain/inventory management principles
in their organizations.
- Predictive Analytics - Analysis
and reports detail the current and projected storage environment.
For example: understand the storage costs of applications, departments,
business units (charge back); get LUN and disk details; see VMware
virtualization storage relationship;, identify areas which will
exceed usage thresholds in the near future; pinpoint dark and
orphaned storage; and much more.
- Storage Supply-to-Demand Mapping -
Determine the logical relationship between logical devices (LUNs)
on storage arrays and application host volumes.
- Enterprise Wide Monitoring and Forecasting – Find
and resolve potential storage issues before they become emergencies.
With the Storage Horizon, customers have dramatically increased their
storage utilization by:
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