Business issues
A mutual-fund firm maintains two identical data centers containing primarily EMC storage arrays, Windows and UNIX servers, and VERITAS backup servers. There are approximately 90 arrays used for business continuation volume data copies and for production databases running Oracle and SQL Server. Managing these large heterogeneous data centers became increasingly burdensome for administrators. They wanted to manage and monitor the two data centers as one environment, but lacked the tools to do so efficiently. The firm also needed more robust capabilities to report storage utilization,trend and forecast usage, assess backup performance, and monitor user and database consumption.

Solutions
After evaluating solutions from all the leading vendors, executives selected Storability® Global Storage Manager (GSM) software to meet the company’s enterprise storage resource management (ESRM) needs.

Financial benefits
Previously, IT staffers used a time-consuming manual process to gather data and compile reports. This had the effect of significantly increasing the risk of input errors while taking so long that often the data was outdated by the time it reached decision-makers’ desks. The GSM software implementation slashed the labor hours formerly required to create usable reports for executives.

Business benefits
One reason the customer selected the GSM software was because it was the only solution that could provide the company with a comprehensive view of its entire environment. Moreover, it was the only solution that supported the various technologies involved, including applications, direct-attached storage, network-attached storage, SAN-attached storage and archived-backup systems. To further regulatory-compliance objectives, the GSM software identifies all servers and file systems that are not part of a scheduled backup job.

Technology benefits
The Global Storage Manager software is a robust troubleshooting aid ─ able to identify, track and timestamp every change made to the company’s expansive infrastructure. At an operational level, administrators are now able to effectively monitor and manage two discrete data centers as a single environment. And since managers can now track and trend storage utilization at any level of the environment, they can more accurately plan their capacity needs.