Business issues
The largest seller of annuities in the United States meets the needs of millions of customers by maintaining an enormous IT environment in two large data centers. Increasing storage demands were making day-to-day storage-management tasks unwieldy and time-consuming. The company also lacked a consistent method for tracking and reporting on its storage assets, particularly its backup environment. To improve the overall efficiency and management of their storage infrastructure, IT managers needed to implement a centralized storage-management strategy.

Solutions
After considering a number of solutions, decision-makers chose Storability® Global Storage Manager (GSM) software. They found that the software’s comprehensive reporting and trending capabilities, as well as its ability to manage both disk and backup environments, set it apart from competing approaches to centralized storage management.

Financial benefits
The Global Storage Manager software enabled administrators to automate or eliminate many routine tasks. Productivity increased because the software allowed each administrator to efficiently manage more of the company’s distributed storage environment.

Business benefits
Integrated, real-time visibility into the storage network dramatically improved backup-completion rates and increased the availability of applications and data to end users.

Technology benefits
Global Storage Manager software provides a single, enterprise-wide view of SAN, NAS, and direct-attached primary storage; secondary and archive backup systems; and applications, including Oracle and SQL databases. Key managers have access to real-time and historical reports on configuration, operational status, performance monitoring and trending, utilization, assignment and resource availability ─ and much more.