Feb 1 -- MonoSphere Inc. has announced the release of its Storage Horizon 3.0. storage capacity management software. This software solution provides large companies an unified view of current and projected storage capacity usage, which enables IT organizations to develop effective storage capacity plans, maximize utilization of existing storage assets and significantly reduce capital expenditures on IT storage, the company said on Monday.



New analytical tools in the product automate the previously manual process of matching storage demand with physical storage inventory, which allows enterprises to fully leverage existing hardware assets, MonoSphere of Redwood City, California said.

Mapping storage usage from application hosts down to the storage array is critical functionality that is long overdue, according to research firm, Taneja Group of Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Enterprises can now make better purchasing decisions based on how much of their storage is used versus how much has been allocated for use, which is how most organizations manage storage capacity today, Taneja Group added.

The demand of Fortune 1000 companies for storage capacity has increased from 44 TB (terabytes) to 698 TB on an average within the past four years, according to analyst firm TheInfoPro’s Wave 8 Report. In MonoSphere’s December 2006 survey of 140 storage professionals, 83 percent responded that despite declining unit costs, storage spending is increasing at a rate faster than IT budget growth, the company said. In fact, 62 percent responded that the increase in capital expenditures for storage causes delays in other important IT initiatives, it added.

This issue underscores the need for large enterprises to develop effective storage capacity plans and maximize utilization of existing storage assets, MonoSphere said. For mid-sized to large-sized enterprises, savings within the first year of implementing MonoSphere’s storage capacity management software can exceed millions of dollars, the company added.

IT organizations are trying to fully leverage their existing computing investments, according to research firm, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) of Milford, Massachusetts. One example of this is creating multiple virtual machines on servers to increase CPU (central processing unit) utilization, ESG said. Another example is deploying a storage capacity management solution like Storage Horizon to increase the utilization of expensive and fast growing storage environments, it added. Efficient IT organizations would sooner or later have to evaluate and deploy these types of solutions, ESG added.

MonoSphere’s Storage Horizon 3.0 enables storage administrators to make informed storage infrastructure decisions about how and when to consolidate storage, increase utilization, add new subsystems, understand the impact of data protection schemes, reclaim under-utilized storage and prevent out-of-storage emergencies, MonoSphere said. Storage Horizon 3.0 is a comprehensive management application for capacity forecasting, capacity budgeting, storage analytics, supply-to-demand mapping and daily usage monitoring, the company added.

Storage Horizon 3.0 includes new features like data collection and reporting from storage arrays, automated supply-to-demand mapping of storage array logical devices to host volumes, and automated association of usage and usage forecasts to storage arrays, MonoSphere said. Storage Horizon 3.0 also provides features like automated, storage-array-based capacity plan generation, 20 template-based analytical reports, in addition to more than 500 custom reports, and alerts for potential “trouble spots" and over-provisioned areas, MonoSphere added.

The storage industry is seeing a trend where end users are moving away from single storage management frameworks that try to solve every problem to focused solutions that solve specific pain points, IDC of Framingham, Massachusetts. These focused solutions tend to provide deeper capability and features around a specific storage management challenge and often provide a better return on investment, IDC said. Storage Horizon is a great example of a focused solution for storage capacity management, IDC added.

Storage Horizon 3.0 delivers major enhancements offering storage administrators unprecedented visibility into the current and forecasted use of their storage subsystems, and empowering companies to reduce their storage expenditures by 40 percent or more, ease the management burden of storage growth, and improve service levels to end users, MonoSphere said.

As with previous versions, Storage Horizon 3.0 does not require installation of software agents on application servers, so the system deploys in hours and collects storage usage data immediately, MonoSphere said.

monosphere.com