Business issues
A leading Internet Service Provider (ISP) needed to integrate two discrete storage infrastructures following a merger. To maximize ROI, planners wanted to maintain existing systems, but eliminate the cost of managing each of two datacenters independently. In addition, IT staffers sought to establish a consistent reporting process that would provide managers with the data needed to improve asset management, device utilization, and overall planning and decision-making enterprise-wide.

Solutions
After investigating various possibilities, storage managers chose Storability Global Storage Manager (GSM) software to meet the solution criteria. Their research revealed that the application was the only available storage-management solution capable of providing a single, centralized storage-management view that included their entire environment and was also correlated end-to-end.

Financial benefits
The productivity-enhancement features of the GSM tool enabled administrators to significantly streamline their overall storage-management procedures. Real-time reporting resulted in better capacity planning and wiser purchasing decisions. And with the ability to fully optimize installed devices based on measurable data, the IT department was able to maximize ROI by deferring new storage investments until they were needed.

Business benefits
The GSM software simplified asset management due to its ability to track every storage component installed in every data center. A customizable dashboard consolidated all administration tools in one place to make it more efficient to run trouble-ticket systems, vendor management tools and storage resource management applications.

Technology benefits
Today, one administrator can efficiently run the firm’s three data centers from anywhere in the company. The GSM application provides real-time information about storage configuration, backup activity, capacity allocation and utilization, performance and operations.