Are OEM toolsets sufficient for managing your storage environment?Are OEM toolsets sufficient for managing your storage environment?Are OEM toolsets sufficient for managing your storage environment?

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Tool Consolidation

Your environment consists of 95% EMC or 95% PURE, so the vendor specific tools provided should be sufficient, right? We think not.

Just because a tool reports on the basic data on an array – how much storage is available, in use, trends over time…. Does not mean they tell you everything. What you don’t know might actually cost you.

The Visual One approach – Outside in reporting.

When creating Visual One we asked ourselves, “What decisions might a customer need to make? What is the data they would need to make those decisions? How to do they collect and correlate data from disparate devices (storage with SAN Switch with host with vm)?”

For example:

A NetApp customer wanted to track space utilization to understand if they are getting the best use of the storage array but didn’t have the level of visibility needed to do so.  Visual One tracks more than the standard and makes the data visible and therefore, usable.

This includes:

• Orphaned space
• Volume Locked Free space                   No one else does this
• Space Fragmentation Analysis            No one else does this
• Snap Space
• Age of data in a file shar                        Requires a whole separate tool set
• Our trend charts                                      Included by array, by node, by pool and by volume – so you know exactly where growth is coming from

The customer avoided storage upgrades for 1 year ($3M savings) by being able to see and track snap space and volume locked free space alone. They would not have seen this information without the level of detail and visibility provided by Visual One (even though they had the NetApp tools installed prior).

The other major advantage of having reporting available separate from that provided by your vendor is no other resources are needed to keep the tool collecting, analyzing and reporting on your data. Once automated collection is setup, you almost never need to touch it. Only to add a new device or remove an existing one. That means no personnel are dedicated to tool upkeep, there are no hidden maintenance fees, and you don’t have to do any extra work to access the reports containing the data you need.