As the scout's motto goes, "Always be prepared", it is best to prepare in advance, actively manage to avert disaster and be prepared in case a disaster does strike. This holds true in life and also for IT.
Your data is the most critical part of your IT environment and hence the storage infrastructure which supports it is critical. Today, 80% of all IT operational issues result from an unwitting change - these issues include application outages, performance problems, unutilized allocated storage, mis-configured systems, and non-compliant systems. Therefore managing the storage infrastructure to meet your required Performance, Security and Availability Service Levels becomes a key to success.
The challenge for IT however is that storage networks continue to grow and complexity spirals so actively managing the Storage Infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult. Storage Service and Change management becomes essential for a well management storage network - including management of Virtual Machine-to-host, host-to-storage, access paths, switch devices and heterogeneous storage arrays. Without tools to enable this it becomes an almost impossible task.
Today NetApp announced a definitive merger agreement to acquire Onaro a leader in Storage Service Management. Storage Service Management answers the challenges of managing large scale storage infrastructures to meet expected Service Levels - it increases data center and storage network efficiencies by proactively measuring and optimizing storage service levels for availability and performance in dynamic data center environments. The predictive nature of Onaro's SANscreen products also makes them ideally suited for modeling and forecasting data center and service level changes—capabilities that customers sorely need as they upgrade, rethink, and deploy their next-generation data centers.
Key capabilities of SANscreen includes
- Verify the present:
- Gain visibility into the different storage services supporting an application (including VMware environments), such as capacity, performance and availability of network paths to storage.
- Access comprehensive global reporting to assess if applications truly require the level of resource currently allocated.
- Uncover latent configuration problems in the SAN and reduce outages
- Record the past:
- Analyze impact of a change
- Provide rapid root-cause analysis when service levels are not met
- Support audit and compliance
- Quickly respond to issues
- Identify applications affected by a failed infrastructure component
- Assure correct operation of redundant paths
- Identify location of performance bottlenecks
- Predict the future:
- Manage changes – “what if” scenarios for SAN planning reduce configuration errors
- Accelerate consolidations and migrations by assuring the integrity of newly installed storage infrastructure
- Perform capacity planning and forecasting
Over 100 large scale Enterprise customers, have found Onaro’s products valuable for ongoing storage service management and also to help storage consolidation, migration, upgrade and disaster recovery readiness. All delivered across the heterogeneous storage environments to meet the demands of large scale enterprise storage customers.
This is what "Being Prepared" is all about. Implementing effective Storage Service Management to your storage infrastructure will help will help your organization avoid unnecessary storage related disasters and in addition help plan for the future.
Adios,
Paul.
