Written by It’s no surprise that in the current economy, company’s are looking to save on costs and improve efficiencies.
Maximize Your Server Storage
IT departments are being asked, even required, to do more with their current resources, the goal being to maximize the use and effectiveness of their infrastructures. Companies are going about this in numerous ways:
* Virtualizing Servers
* Optimizing Resources
* Storage Reclamation
* Condensing Responsibilities
With strapped resources, managing this process has become more vital and challenging. Virtualization can conseal performance issues and challenge storage management. Administrators may lose sight of the big picture, by becoming reactive in attempts to maintain their SLA’s, and in turn, delaying true management of the environment by handling the immediate issue at hand. Often reactive management leads to further complications and inefficiency. Home grown scripts and tools quickly become outdated as technology and personnel change. In these conditions, an ineffectual and incomplete evaluation of the environment is made by management, and future forecasts are based on inaccurate or incomplete data.
Access to information and gaining visibility into how an IT environment operates should not be a difficult task. Unfortunately, this is the reality. In particular, this problem resides in diverse, heterogeneous, and distributed environments made up of storage, servers, and applications from different vendors and serving different purposes. Further complicating this issue are native tools that provide only limited visibility, and often only into the devices they’re bundled with, preventing administrators and managers from seeing those devices and their performance as they relate to the larger networked environment.
A solution to this issue would be a simple and easy-to-use tool that provides end-to-end, actionable visibility into the IT infrastructure, and that also enables cost savings and optimization. Here’s where Tek-Tools Profiler comes in. Profiler offers a vast amount of information, but how do you leverage the info to your cost control strategies and reduce the pain of implementation and tracking?
Profiler can identify opportunities for storage reclamation and resource optimization, giving you the ability to maximize those opportunities into real storage, performance, space, and power savings. Profiler taps the same data collected to provide management with forecasting and trending, as well as categorization information to help make proper decisions relative to organizational needs. With Profiler, customers have reclaimed an average of 30% of their storage that was unused or wasted. For every terabyte of reclaimed storage, organizations save approximately $10,000. The average Tek-Tools customer realizes an ROI of up to 40% within 3 to 6 months.
Listed below are 10 ways you can repurpose or reclaim resources in your company’s environment.
1. Server Consolidation – Profiler identifies candidates for virtualization via its server consolidation reports, allowing organizations to retire hardware, reduce power consumption, streamline management, and free up rack space.
2. Recover Resources in the Virtualized Infrastructure:
1. Identify unused virtual machines that can be turned off in order to reclaim performance capacity, or deleted in order to reclaim storage.
2. Find orphaned VMDK files that can be deleted, freeing space and improving performance.
3. Expose virtual machines with over-allocated resources (storage, CPU, memory, etc.) that can be released back into the virtual infrastructure.
3. Array Capacity Reclamation – find storage on arrays that is unused or allocated but free: If you are leveraging your storage fully, you can retire storage you don’t need anymore, and put off future purchases of additional storage.
4. Clean Your Files – Do you know what files can be archived or deleted? Identify files and directories by age, size, and ownership that can be relocated or removed, reducing primary storage usage, backup size, and duration, as well as disaster recovery requirements.
5. Snapshot and Mirror management – Do you know how much storage you are using for snapshots and mirrors? If the protection policies exceed your SLAs or recovery point objectives, you could be consuming production storage with copies of data you don’t need.
6. Identify Thin Provisioning Candidates – Discover file systems using a fraction of their allocated storage and that are growing slowly.
7. Tier Your Storage – Do you know when you can move your storage to less expensive tiers? Identify storage that can be moved to other tiers based on usage and performance, and either free up your performance storage for I/O hungry applications, or add less expensive storage in your next capital expenditure.
8. Save Time – Are your administrators tracking storage the old way – with manual processes and populating outdated spreadsheets? Profiler can alleviate the data collection, correlation, and dissemination of reports with automation, allowing administrators to focus on productive tasks.
9. Grouping and Reports – Do you need to perform budgetary planning, charge other departments for your storage or size your DR site (plus growth)? Profiler allows you to group resources in ways that serve your business needs and meet your business objectives of maximizing the use and effectiveness of IT resources and budgets.
10. Profiler can identify underutilized backup resources, as well as identify old and stagnant data that can be removed, freeing storage, reducing the size of backups, and enabling you to maximize the use of tape drives and media servers, so that money doesn’t have to be spent needlessly.
Manual tracking of backup failures, collection of performance and storage trending, and tracking of storage utilization is something that companies pay employees or consultants to do. All too often this leads to an incomplete an ineffectual view of IT, as these efforts are ineffective, inefficient, and complex. Even without today’s economic challenges, companies cannot afford to continue managing IT resources blindly and with inefficient, error-prone procedures.
Under these circumstances, a solid and proven reporting, monitoring, and forecasting tool is invaluable. Managers and administrators cannot optimize and maximize their IT infrastructures without first gaining real insight into what resources are available, how they are being used, and what will be needed both in the near and distant futures. In Tek-Tools Profiler, organizations are enabled to do more with less, as time is freed up for core tasks and resources are utilized in the most efficient manner possible.
