Storage Optimization Solution Overview
Storage teams continually seek actionable analytics that can be used to eliminate inefficient storage utilization. Growing storage requirements and shrinking budgets demand on-going processes. The Storage Optimization solution identifies both on-prem and cloud resources that may be reclaimable or that can be optimized.
Analytics can be used to find dark storage, in an effort to contain costs and delay/avoid purchases. By examining collected historical data for multiple data points, Storage Optimization provides visibility into storage utilization over time, with true analytics that support infrastructure rightsizing. With its end-to-end vantage point, IT Analytics leverages already collected data to deliver a detailed storage utilization perspective. For example, while collecting data from storage arrays, IT Analytics can use the LUN-to-host mapping to retrieve additional host details, such as the capacity that has been allocated to a host. Often storage allocated to a host never gets used.
The following scenarios represent a sampling of challenges faced by data center teams:
• Decommissioned hosts leave behind storage that is never de-provisioned.
• Overprovisioned hosts may offer candidates for storage reclamation.
• VMs that are not in the VM inventory consume disks in datastores.
• Temporary VM snapshots are forgotten, yet their files consume space.
• Idle and powered-off VMs continue to have storage allocated to them.
• Expensive tier-1 storage contains files that should be migrated to less expensive storage.
• LUN reclamation opportunities can be realized by identifying unallocated LUNs, allocated but undiscovered LUNs, discovered but unused LUNs, and LUNs that have had no activity in the past 30 days.
• Mergers, acquisitions, and migrations require illumination of storage usage.
To learn how to use the Storage Optimization solution to address common use cases, explore: