It will come as a surprise to nobody that data is growing exponentially. According to an update from the International Data Corporation (IDC), more than 59 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created, captured, copied, and consumed globally in 2020. All of that data is leading to enormous growth in organizations’ IT storage capacity, frequently from multiple storage vendors. Critically, applications and customer experiences rely on storage because customers expect instant access to information. As a costly and unnecessary response, many organizations are investing in more and more storage without optimizing the storage they already have.
By optimizing your current multiple-vendor storage, you could realize substantial savings and mitigate the pitfalls of unutilized storage.
The Potential Cost of Unused Storage
As organizations require more data storage, the instinctive response is simply to add more storage. Cost-conscious companies, driven by finding the best deal on storage, will often procure storage from multiple vendors. They may even move some storage to the cloud to save money, but can’t move it all due to regulatory or compliance issues.
Instead of making the best use of the storage they already have, organizations bulk up their storage because they don’t understand the usage and application dependencies of the multiple storage platforms they have in place. Not only do storage costs mount as data requirements soar, more storage also requires additional investment in supporting resources such as processing, bandwidth, and power.
Sooner or later, finance departments start investigating to see just where all the spending on storage is going. The storage providers themselves rarely provide comprehensive reporting tools, and even if they do, the tools are proprietary and limited to the manufacturer’s products. That means storage administrators must embark on a labor-intensive effort to collate usage reports on spreadsheets from multiple vendors across potentially hybrid environments.
The Challenge of Optimizing Storage from Multiple Vendors
Ensuring you are getting maximum efficiency from your storage is not easy. It can be a seemingly impossible task to extract reliable, accurate performance and configuration data from your storage devices when using multi-vendor storage. To do it properly and ensure the data you are getting is accurate, you need to have a good grasp of your vendor’s configurable line items and APIs.
Many vendors do provide comprehensive storage discovery and visibility, and if you’ve standardized on a single vendor, you may be okay. But if you’re operating multi-vendor storage or in a hybrid cloud environment, you probably don’t have the visibility you need to optimize your storage. These inadequacies force IT teams into laborious, error-prone manual discovery. To overcome these challenges, organizations are looking for data storage solutions that offer exceptional data visibility, so that they can optimize storage systems and reduce costs across multiple vendors..
How to Optimize Data Storage
There are better ways to save money on your data storage. By implementing a solution that facilitates storage discovery and visibility, you can maximize your data storage efficiency and performance, delaying investment in more storage, thereby cutting the total cost of ownership (TCO) and generating greater returns on investment.
A comprehensive discovery tool, capable of working across multiple vendors and the cloud, will ensure you are getting the most accurate record of your storage footprint. The result is detailed visibility of your storage environment and a system for monitoring any potential overloading of the network that may arise from your storage infrastructure. Such a tool dynamically gathers data on performance, configuration, and capacity from storage arrays, servers, and switches, according to your IT policies, and performs end-to-end application mapping.
How Device42 Can Help
Device42 Storage Discovery offers storage discovery capability across multiple vendors that translates into savings. It ensures visibility of the most comprehensive details of your storage footprint. Compared with traditional storage management tools, Device42 Storage Discovery helps accurately identify and predict bottlenecks in your applications arising from storage infrastructure.
Device42 Storage Discovery dynamically records performance, configuration, and capacity data from storage arrays, servers, and switches and maps applications from the ground up. As well as viewing end-to-end mapping of storage elements, you can also observe how storage is replicated. With integrated business-level reporting, you also gain the ability to make informed capacity decisions driven by your specific organization’s needs.
Device42 Storage Discovery enables you to do the following:
- Deploy easily
- Scale with your storage
- Discover storage infrastructure including EMC Symmetrix VMAX, VNX, Hitachi v/USP, vSP, IBM DS6000, NetApp, Pure Storage
- Discover fabrics/switches from Brocade, Cisco, and others
- View built-in business-level reporting and analytics
- Communicate efficiently and securely with the cloud
If you are interested in availing of the most complete storage discovery and visibility solution on the market, contact Device42 today, and one of our experts will walk you through the solution and how it could work for your organization.
