Business Challenge
The storage market is chock-full of powerful technologies provided by a number of different companies. Many of their products have been acquired by your organization during the last two years. As a result, one of the biggest problems related to storage management today is that every storage tool comes with a separate management console that needs to be mastered. This means that storage management team members are drowning in a sea of training manuals and the process of documenting simple tasks is becoming more complex and a never-ending chore.
Since the inception of the storage resource management (SRM) market, organizations have sought to identify opportunities to maximize their storage assets. What has been lacking is an efficient means to know how to optimize storage assets. Recently, the industry has refocused its interests in dealing with this shortcoming due to the critical nature of data storage.
Solution
To address this gap in the storage market, TeraCloud developed the TeraCloud Storage Analytics (TSA) product to provide an analytic solution that improves decision making for storage management. With this capability, storage managers now have a reliable, cost effective, scaleable analytical tool for managing storage assets across the entire enterprise from a single view.
Within an 8-hour window following installation, TSA enables users to search, identify patterns and relationships of data usage amid massive quantities of information. Armed with this information, storage managers can now develop innovative solutions and solve strategic and operational problems.
Value
Benefits our Customers experience from TeraCloud Storage Analytics (TSA):
__ Utilization baseline – TSA identifies performance improvement opportunities by quickly analyzing usage at the device and data usage levels
__ Operational efficiencies – TSA isolates areas where corrective action can improve throughput, offering storage managers an effective means to produce value for their customers by reducing operating costs and/or optimizing storage assets
__ Valuable insight - for meeting data growth challenges, while driving down operational expenses year over year by optimizing current storage assets
__ Validation process – knowing the storage environment is operating within your storage parameters
__ Reporting - The information gathered is online for quires or can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. Additionally, the content can populate a word document that can be printed, bound into a booklet and presented.
__ Visual analysis - generates graphs and charts
__ Ad hoc user interface – provides a framework that allows each user to customize their view
Specific Storage disciplines addressed by the TSA tool are:
__ Back up Coverage Analysis
__ Capacity Planning with Trending and Forecasting Analysis
__ Comprehensive Storage Reporting
__ Storage Accountability
__ Storage Analytics
__ Storage Asset Management
__ Storage Capacity with emphasis on Storage Growth
__ Storage Cost Allocation (Chargeback)
__ Dataset Organization Attribute Standardization/Validation
TeraCloud Storage Analytics for Strategic Outsourcing
The world we live in is very different from even a few years ago. There is a constant need for new ways to store, retain and retrieve data in an environment where vast quantities of data require new computing architectures. Volumes of data growth are unprecedented. This presents a serious challenge for outsourcing companies that were awarded contracts to provide services defined by the customer years earlier.
Business Challenge
Outsourcers must continue to look for better business processes encompassing IT, cost effective solutions and tools that are easy to use and require minimal staff training. The three stage problem - people, processes and hardware optimization require constant attention. This is particularly true since multi-year outsourcing contracts usually have performance improvements, reduced headcounts and increased customer satisfaction requirements. A critical area for outsourcing firms to address is that of storage management.
Existing storage policies based on asset management software have to evolve from their current state. Many of today’s storage administrators have been trained to log and track data volumes, identify who has what assets and how they are being used.
Storage management is now being extended to what software is used, which systems were accessed, how data is stored, transferred and used. This gives storage management a new life and set of challenging requirements to meet.
To address this gap in the market, TeraCloud developed the TeraCloud Storage Analytics (TSA) product to provide an analytic solution that improves decision-making in storage management and provides insight into information lifecycle management.
