FireScope Solutions for Storage Management

Storage represents a significant segment of the modern IT budget, yet most organizations have little to no ability to relate how these investments support the business. The ripple effects of this gap touch every level of IT operations, from incident management to long term planning:

• IT operators cannot easily correlate event impact at the storage level to user experiences, hampering incident response.
• Heterogeneous storage architectures suffer from multiple, disparate management tools with varying levels of visibility.
• Storage allocation is ad hoc, often resulting in an individual filer becoming overtaxed by multiple business-critical services.
• Scaling of resources lags behind actual utilization growth, resulting in performance degradation and outages that can impact revenue, productivity and customer perception.
• Procurement is disconnected from predicted business growth, resulting in lost opportunities for cost savings.

To surmount these challenges, organizations require a new breed of management instrumentation that encompasses the entire infrastructure stack and integrates data beyond the traditional scope of IT to link technology events to their impact on user experiences and business outcomes. And the most cost effective way to achieve this is with FireScope Unify.

The FireScope approach starts by aggregating data across vendor and technology siloes. In the case of storage, a combination of SNMP and direct API requests enable FireScope to aggregate key utilization and performance metrics directly from NetApp, EMC, 3Par, Hitachi and other commonly deployed storage systems. All of this data is normalized and correlated with metrics gathered from the rest of the infrastructure stack based on the critical IT services or applications they contribute to. Additionally, these applications and services are tapped directly for data that describe the business outcomes derived, enabling FireScope Unify to link technology events with their impact on the business and user experiences.

Business Value
• Simplify management of heterogeneous storage architectures by consolidating into a single interface.
• Link storage allocation to the critical services they support
• Correlate events at the storage level to their impact on the rest of the infrastructure stack - and ultimately, user experiences - for faster, more effective incident response.
• Align capacity planning with predicted business growth at the service level to make the right purchases at the right time.

The result, IT operations finally has a single interface to manage the complete infrastructure stack, enabling all levels of IT to respond faster, more effectively to changing business and technological conditions. Operators can quickly identify when user experiences are not meeting expectations and within seconds perform root cause analysis. Managers can more effectively prioritize their teams' efforts based on business criticality. Leadership can align budgets with highly accurate historical analysis of growth and manage for business outcomes.

Take the first step to mastering the challenges of heterogeneous storage architectures, schedule a demo or download a free trial today.