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Successfully managing your storage capacity requires the ability to see the entire picture, as well as understanding all of the individual pieces that are part of the whole. While it’s easy to think that the answer to ever-expanding quantities of data is simply to increase storage capacity, that certainly isn’t how to maximize your current resources. Not only is continually increasing your storage inefficient, but it also leaves you vulnerable to unnecessary and reactive purchases. Here’s how Visual One can make finding hidden storage easy.
Visual One helps IT leaders by giving you an overall picture of your environment and also breaking it down by application, location, and type of data stored, as well as tracking usage over time. Through efficient tools that enable data transparency, Visual One provides IT leaders with data-driven insights that allow them to save time, reduce costs and improve efficiency. Finding hidden storage and free space with help from Visual One will allow you to maximize the efficiency of your current data storage resources.
Maximize Your Current Resources
If someone dumped a box of puzzle pieces on the table in front of you, you might be able to guess what the finished picture would look like based on the individual pieces, but you could also quite easily draw the wrong conclusion. Frequently, businesses track storage usage and growth trends at a high level, without monitoring trends for individual storage devices. Failing to balance the big picture with the finer details often causes organizations to miss key information and crucial growth trends that can result in reactive and wasteful decision-making.
When it comes to finding hidden storage or free space, starting with the details can help IT leaders form a more complete picture of their storage environment. An array might initially look great from a capacity standpoint, but a closer look at the pool level could reveal hidden inefficiencies. Starting with the details, with the individual storage devices, and inspecting what’s free and what’s not, can help IT leaders uncover trends that impact the big picture.
Having a complete picture of the storage environment, both the big picture and the details, is the first step to being able to identify free storage space. These insights allow IT leaders to maximize available resources, proactively track growth trends, and forecast precise outcomes. That’s why Visual One helps IT leaders by organizing independent data elements and delivering them as a unified, visual analysis across the enterprise.
Orphaned Storage
Finding hidden storage is often like putting together that puzzle. While each piece of the puzzle has a different part of the picture on it, each piece of storage is allocated to different projects or departments. However, unlike a puzzle that can stay together once it’s assembled, storage requirements change, projects change, and the different pieces of storage need to frequently be rearranged to form a new picture.
Sometimes those unused pieces of storage find their way back to the puzzle box, but more than often, they are just floating around lost, and the picture becomes incomplete. Let’s say that an organization has a new project that just got approved. The storage team then allocates space for the project. An obstacle comes up, and the project is canceled, but that information is never relayed back to the storage team. Now that space is technically free, but no one realizes it is available.
In general, there are two types of orphaned storage:
- nothing is mapped to that storage
- no IO is going to that particular storage
Visual One can help IT leaders reclaim both kinds of orphaned storage.
Failing to optimize your current storage resources is similar to buying a warehouse and then only filling it half full and leaving it completely disorganized. There are many opportunities to find hidden storage, and Visual One can help IT leaders by giving them the ability to see something and take action on it. With the right tools from Visual One, IT leaders can look inside the storage infrastructure to find hidden free space and improve ineffective or fragmented storage space. Making the best use of existing storage saves money and helps avoid unnecessary purchases.
With a single pane of glass across the enterprise, you can improve and maximize the efficiency of your data storage resources. Visual One helps IT leaders by providing data-driven insights that allow for optimal use of the IT budget, saving time, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. Schedule a demo to talk to a Visual One data expert.
Finding Hidden Storage: Key Takeaways
- Successfully managing your storage capacity requires the ability to see the entire picture, as well as understanding all of the individual pieces.
- Continually increasing your storage is inefficient and leaves you vulnerable to unnecessary and reactive purchases.
- Visual One helps IT leaders by giving you an overall picture of your environment and also breaking it down by application, location, and type of data stored.
- With the right tools from Visual One, IT leaders can look inside the storage infrastructure to find hidden free space and improve ineffective or fragmented storage space.
