Does your organization continuously create more data while never deleting any of it? Organizations today store and use more data than ever before in our connected world. Government regulations and the competitive landscape are also putting pressure on you to keep more data and for longer periods.

To address this issue, you will likely have these goals on your radar:

● Reduce your capital and operational costs by reducing your storage requirements.
● Improve your application availability and service levels by reducing downtime.
● Mitigate the competitive risks associated with losing data in this rapidly changing environment.

You will then need to develop a data storage strategy. To be effective, you will have to provide new tools to your storage managers and address the manual processes in place that are ineffective and costly.

The case for purchasing a new data storage management tool makes more sense today than ever with exponential data growth even in tight economic times. This will also help you stop throwing capacity at the problem. You might say that the cost of capacity is coming down, but it's not coming down fast enough to justify your demand for capacity that keeps on going up.

Storage Resource Management (SRM) Tools to help you understand and monitor your data
Functions of an SRM Suite would include data storage, data collection, data backup, data recovery, SAN performance analysis, storage virtualization, storage provisioning, forecasting of future needs, maintenance of activity logs, user authentication, protection from hackers and worms, and management of network expansion. 
A SRM will help manage and monitor a wide range of storage related systems, including virtual machines, file servers, email, databases, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, mainframes and desktops from a single administration interface. You will be able to protect your critical data requiring continuous availability and gain high-efficiency backup of key business applications.

This solution may be offered as a stand-alone product, or as part of an integrated program suite. Options offered begin at entry level to let you start small, but can scale up to Enterprise level to meet your growing needs.

An optimal Storage Management Suite will enable you to:

1) Integrate performance management to allow end to end views, including devices, SAN fabrics and storage systems 

● Get a data center wide view of storage allocation, utilization, consumption, and performance

2) Provide insight for reporting and analytics, performance trending & analysis, in addition to best practices provisioning in real-time

● Track capacity utilization and trend growth using SRM reports, monitoring and alerts, policy-based action and file-system analysis (based on file name, file type, file size, date attributes, last accessed & last modified)
● Better understand the kind of data stored, where it’s stored and how often it’s used to best determine the right place to store it (e.g. tier 1 storage or price competitive archival storage)

3) Automate and simplify data management that will save you money by reducing the reliance on IT experts, without risking data protection.

● Create enterprise policies for your file systems and databases to act intelligently on this information● Get early warnings when file systems are running out of space to improve application availability

Engage Sentia to help you find the right solution to help you manage more data while reducing capital and operational costs.

Read this thought leadership white paper for more insight: Using IBM data reduction solutions to manage more data with less infrastructure.

Call me at 1-866-610-8489 or drop me a line to discuss your challenges and help you automate and simplify your storage management.

Regards,

Paul Oh
VP, Technical Services