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Case StudiesCompanies are always hungry for information that will give them a competitive advantage. This has led to massive growth in the collection of data – and demand for the infrastructure to store it. Here’s how proactive IT leaders at a large enterprise saved their company $250,000 and recovered IT resources through thoughtful storage management. (Download PDF Case Study)
IT teams in a modern enterprise are tasked with managing these valuable assets across several data centers. As a company’s IT needs evolve, disparate storage environments can create uncertainty that affects crucial business decisions.
When you don’t have the full picture, how can you be sure you’re making the right choice? That’s the question a large auto parts retailer wanted to answer.
Proactive IT Leaders Create Opportunities
The retailer’s existing IT infrastructure was spread across 7 data centers. A new application was in their pipeline for deployment but it required additional storage allocation. The plan was to purchase a new array to accommodate the application’s needs.
Their IT team decided this was a good time to take a more proactive approach. They used the chance to get a better look at their current environment before committing to the expense.
Complete Storage Visibility Empowers Better Decision-Making
IT leaders are responsible for balancing infrastructure costs and business value. They can only deliver results when they have a complete understanding of their storage environment. But when working with multiple vendors, it’s not always easy to get an accurate assessment.
In the case of this large retailer, they usually relied on their storage vendor for advice. It was then up to their internal team to go through and make sense of vendor reports. As their IT Manager put it, it was “…a very complex and manual task which was error prone as well as impossible to keep up with.” Without a holistic perspective, management could never be 100% confident they were making informed business decisions.
Success Doesn’t Have to Come with Growing Pains
According to the IT Manager, “One of our challenges with our large and diverse IT Infrastructure was keeping track of our storage environment.” The retailer needed help from someone who can provide a unified analysis of their storage management process throughout all their vendors. They partnered with Visual One for their multi-vendor capabilities that are trusted by global enterprises, including Fortune 1000 companies.
They quickly produced a key insight. It turns out that 75% of a storage array was orphaned. A previous migration project left this array with data that was no longer needed but it still appeared in their system as allocated.
The IT manager was eager to share this discovery. They were able to prove that there was more than enough capacity in their existing environment for the new application’s requirements. Not only did they avoid a potential $250,000 purchase, but they were also able to reclaim resources that were being utilized to house irrelevant data.
All of this was accomplished without any downtime or extra setup – benefits stated by their Director of Architecture: “We decided to use Visual One Intelligence® because it leveraged our existing environment without requiring any additional tools or products to install.”
As your organization becomes more successful, the tools that brought you here shouldn’t get in the way of future growth. Visual One uncovers opportunities to keep your storage environment efficient, reliable, and cost-effective. Don’t waste your IT talents trying to piece together reports like a puzzle.
How do you avoid orphaned storage?
A company’s storage environment is constantly changing to meet business needs. Sometimes, this can result in orphaned storage – capacity that appears as “in-use” but isn’t. This adds to infrastructure costs and reduces perceived available capacity. Enterprise-wide data visibility is essential for an optimized storage management process. Visual One arms IT decision-makers with the tools to make sure no byte is left behind.
Key Takeaways
- Companies rely on diverse systems to fuel their growth. This can lead to ambiguity that wastes both human and monetary resources.
- IT executives are expected to make strategic decisions that allow their organization to excel – a frustrating challenge when you don’t have clear data.
- Transparency across all storage environments is necessary to keep infrastructure spending in check.
- Visual One can help you transform complexity into clarity so you can use your existing resources efficiently and put you in a better position to capture future opportunities.
