What is storage analytics and what are the benefits?
In todays IT storage seems to proliferate. The more storage you have the faster it will fill up and needs expansion. This seems to be the case for high-performance storage like SAN, shared storage like NAS, direct attached storage like RAID or cloud storage. As easy as it starts out and looks at the beginning as complex it can get along the way. One question remains: What is the best way to manage storage and take control?
With this the complexity increases. Getting insight and keeping control of the storage landscape becomes more difficult over time. More and more questions come up.
Open questions about storage, SAN, NAS, RAID and Cloud storage:
- How many storage devices do you have?
- How can you monitor your storage?
- How much capacity is left and available and where?
- What file types take up most space?
- Where is the fastest growth and the most urgent need to expand?
- What happens, when a new project starts?
- Where do you have duplicate projects and files?
- Where is data that has not been touched for months and can move to the archive?
- Where can you improve cost?
- What are trends in the usage of the storage?
- What investment for expansion is necessary and when?
All those questions have an influence on productivity. They impact the efficiency of storage usage and the workflow. How can you get answers to them? The storage devices themselves don´t give these answers. If they give out some information it is only about themselves not about the storage landscape as a whole. How do you manage storage? How to take rational decisions in this situation?
Additionally, filled up storage is dangerous. Not only does it become more difficult to find projects and files when the file count increases. Storage can become slow, unresponsive, unpredictable in behavior and even lose files when filled up close to 100%. This situation has to be avoided or even anticipated before it occurs.
How to track data storage?
To track what exists and what happens on your storage devices you need a solution that collects data about usage, file count, existing extensions, timelines and more. This is called storage analytics.
What is storage analytics?
Storage analytics collects metrics data about storage. Storage analytics offers information and statistics about the storage devices. This information shows the current state, usage trends and storage dynamics over time. Storage analytics helps to improve storage management, increase efficiency, optimize control and planning.
Multi-vendor storage analytics collects and offers statistics of storage devices of multiple vendors. This way, storage analytics offers one place to collect data of all storage devices. Multi-vendor storage analytics creates a single-source-of-truth concerning the storage landscape.
What is the best way to manage disk and cloud storage?
Storage analytics collects data about physical data storage to improve storage management. But there is more than just on-prem storage. A broader approach is needed to manage disk and cloud storage together.
Storage analytics by DataIntell offers this complete perspective. DataIntell displays information about all your storage devices in one place independent of storage vendor and product. All RAID, SAN, NAS, disk, SSD/NVME and cloud storage in use are analysed and displayed. This results in an unprecedented overview and insight into your storage landscape, the current state and dynamics over time. There is even an integration with Archiware´s P5 Archive to display the status of the archive storage (on disk, LTO tape or cloud).
DataIntell is the solution to all the open questions mentioned above.
To complete the picture of what is happening on your storage DataIntell offers timelines that display the filling state of each storage over time. This way it is easy to discover where expansion might be necessary or where there might be dormant capacity or unused data.
How to track projects that use different storage?
DataIntell goes even one step further an lets you customize sets of directories or files independent of their storage location to track their status. Even files and directories that are scattered on the storage landscape can be tracked this way.
Many more details and features contribute to an even more complete control of the whole storage landscape. The integration with Archiware P5 Archive is one example. This integration offers analytics of the archive storage, independent if it is on disk, tape or cloud storage. What are the dynamics of the archive? How much is archived per month or year? These and more questions are answered and displayed as statistics and graphics.
Take control of the complete storage landscape with all devices including SAN, NAS, RAID, SSD, NVME, cloud and even LTO tape pays off. Now all decisions and investments can be fact-based and rational. Planning and anticipating dynamics increase efficiency and avoid emergency situations.
Benefits of Storage analytics and data management with DataIntell
- Reduce complexity of storage management
- Get and keep constant insight of your storage landscape
- Watch specific file sets or directories
- Find and remove duplicates
- Increase efficiency of existing storage
- Receive notifications when thresholds are reached
- Improve the structure of your storage setup
- Plan ahead in time for necessary storage expansions
- Find unused “cold” data that can and should be archived
Learn more about DataIntell features here
