News

posted on 06 May 2008 22:19

MonoSphere has greatly enhanced Storage Horizons, its storage capacity management product, to support additional EMC and IBM hardware and provide better information on VMware storage use.

Storage Horizons is an agent-less storage resource management product that focusses on capacity management and identifying what heterogeneous storage hierarchy elements are used by appications. In release 3.7 it has added:-

- Automated chargeback: Logical and physical IT assets can be grouped by business unit and other parameters and their storage use - LUNs, arrays, actual capacity, etc,- costed and charged.

- Improved VMware support: find out how apps in virtual machines consume storage at the array level, and check out the relationships between array LUNs, ESX servers, VMware file systems (VMFS), VMware virtual disks (VMDK), guest operating systems (OS), and guest OS file systems/raw devices, determining
when additional storage is optimally required.

- Added support for IBM DS-series storage arrays.

- Added support for EMC Celerra filers.

- Better analysis of database storage use: features for analyzing storage consumption of Oracle, MS SQL, and Sybase databases, as well as MS Exchange. For Oracle databases, users can "drill down" into the database to see details and forecasts of its table spaces and data files and view log allocations. Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) allows Storage Horizon to recognize the single database across a cluster of hosts, as well as analyze, forecast, and report the database storage usage as a single database.

- Better analytics: pre-configured reports for storage consumption by volume group, free pool report, LUN to disk analysis, dark storage (allocated but unused) and more identified. This helps storage administrators improve capacity usage and more smoothly provision extra capaci

Bob Laliberte, a storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said: "With MonoSphere's agentless Storage
Horizon software, storage usage can be determined across a heterogeneous environment, and it also provides comprehensive capacity management analysis. This includes advanced forecasting, chargeback reporting and delivers detailed cost implications for data protection strategies or unused data."

Storage Horizons looks like it could be used by storage adminstrators to look more deeply under the covers of storage use by IT department clients and facilitate charging for their actual consumption.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}

www.monosphere.com.