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Press ReleasesAfter being named a finalist for three 2021 SDC Awards including Storage Management Innovation of the Year and Storage Company of the Year, Visual One Intelligence® was honored as a runner-up for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Innovation of the Year Award.
The Storage, Digitalization and Cloud (SDC) Awards are the premier IT event for rewarding success in the products and services that are the foundation for digital transformation. In the 2021 SDC Awards, the SaaS Innovation of the Year Award celebrates the most exciting advances from a SaaS provider.
As a SaaS dedicated to storage resource management, Visual One Intelligence® changes the game for providing timely and comprehensive infrastructure data to IT teams.
Visual One Intelligence® organizes independent data elements into a unified, visual analysis across clients’ entire multi-vendor storage environments. This data traditionally came through an in-depth and visually compelling customer dashboard, accessible 24/7 through an internet portal.
However, Visual One Intelligence® believed more could be done. Conversations with clients revealed that infrastructure teams don’t just need access to data (which can feel endless and overwhelming in scope). Instead, IT teams need the right data to be delivered to them directly, already sifted through and presented in a way that addresses their top-of-mind concerns.
A New Standard for Data Reporting
As a result, Visual One Intelligence® has added a data-mining process which provides personalized updates to clients on a weekly basis. This routine, customer-specific update brings all of the most relevant information directly to infrastructure teams, saving them time by reducing the need for manual reporting procedures and over-used alarms. By bringing the right data directly to the customer, Visual One Intelligence® helps IT teams start their week with the confidence of knowing they have their infrastructure under control.
Every client update includes any significant changes from the prior week, such as:
• Capacity changes
• Performance changes
• New errors and other alerts
• Orphaned storage
• Changes in the past week to device configuration including new firmware levels.
Changes to typical growth patterns (either performance or capacity) are summarized and specific workload patterns are analyzed for each device. When these patterns change, the customer is notified in the client update.
Thanks to this innovation, customers have avoided unplanned outages, planned for capacity requirements, and prevented last-minute reactive measures. It is all part of Visual One Intelligence®’s goal of empowering organizations to be proactive – not reactive.
Customers now get a succinct Monday morning email summarizing:
• Anything that has changed in the past week
• Alerts that need to be reviewed and/or addressed
• Opportunities to improve overall efficiency
• Anything the client has identified as crucial to their success
• Anything Visual One Intelligence® believes is critical for the client to know.
SaaS Innovation in Action
Two case studies illustrate the impact of this new data-reporting process.
Guarding against Ransomware
Because of the specific profile of ransomware, it is possible to detect early warning signs before a full attack takes place. With Visual One Intelligence®’s client updates, that is exactly what some customers have already done.
There are four key indicators found in storage infrastructure data that suggest a ransomware attempt may be in progress, with each indicator building on the last. With each indicator discovered in a storage environment, the odds of a ransomware attempt go up – making it most helpful to know about and investigate any anomalies as early as possible.
When one client received their weekly update from Visual One Intelligence®, they were surprised to see the first key indicator highlighted in the report: there was an unexpected spike in the workload of one of their arrays. More troublingly, the spike was isolated to just a few LUNs – the second key indicator of potential infiltration.
Without a weekly report that specifically highlighted these indicators – and the potential risk they represented – the client admitted they would not have known about the spikes or investigated them in any way. Instead, they were able to take immediate action to identify the source of the anomalous spikes and ensure continued organizational security.
There is rarely enough time in a day for IT teams to track all these sorts of changes throughout their entire environment. With Visual One Intelligence®’s client reports, businesses gain proactive analysis that helps them prevent problems early rather than reacting too late.
Preventing Unexpected Outages
Visual One also tracks what and how all storage is mapped from a storage array to a host end point. If there are any “single points of failure,” the customer is alerted so they can take action to avoid unplanned and costly outages. These conditions can occur within the storage array when cabling or specific adapters are configured in such a way as to become a single point of failure – as well as within the SAN switch or even within the host itself.
This happened to a customer during a firmware upgrade on a series of hosts during a weekend maintenance window. When Visual One’s automated AI ran after the upgrade, this change was noted in the client update with before and after data – prior to the host being placed back into production. This good timing allowed the customer to identify and resolve the situation without incurring any additional outages. Even better, it saved the customer from any exposure in the future. In the customer’s own words, “Without Visual One I would never have noticed this until my end user complained about performance or we had an unplanned outage.”
Curious to see how this works? We’d love to show you, just a schedule a demo with us!
