Fast-track your way to increased visibility and improved performance of your storage infrastructure by following these three principles.
Storage monitoring software is integral to the success of any organization. Given the widespread adoption of big data and virtualization over the years, storage has become a central element of almost every IT infrastructure, so be sure to keep in mind these three key principles of storage resource management so you can better optimize your storage environment.
Visualize
Since most IT infrastructures include an assortment of storage devices—typically from a variety of vendors—it’s important for the storage solution you use to be able to support all of them with ease.
Being able to view and summarize your organization’s storage infrastructure data in one unified and consolidated view can help remove some of the manual effort and help provide you with a contextual understanding of your most vital storage data.
Analyze
Collecting and analyzing data and metrics on the performance and usage of storage devices within an organization’s infrastructure—all while trying to produce timely reporting—can present its own challenges.
Seldom is there time to sit and sift through endless data tables to analyze your environment’s storage information. For greater ease in analyzing storage health check reports, leveraging a tool with built-in visual analysis features can cut down the time you spend on manual analysis while generating reports on a custom schedule so you don’t have to.
Optimize
Not having a pulse on your current and future capacity and storage utilization can be a tightrope walk leading to failures or worse—unplanned spend.
Since storage device failure can be expensive—whether due to a lack of storage or slow response time because of oversubscription—it’s important to automate capacity insights where possible using each layer, array, pool, and LUN/volume to help determine storage capacity growth and trends in your storage environment.
When it comes to capacity planning, a storage resource monitoring solution can help make the biggest impact by collecting metrics on capacity trends across multiple storage devices and vendors. This ultimately helps you understand the growth of your storage capacity so you can more easily plan capacity needs based on when you’ll likely run out of space and before issues arise.
Whether or not you use a storage resource management tool in your environment today, keeping the three core principles in mind will help set you up for success.
Looking for a Storage Management Solution?
SolarWinds® Storage Resource Monitor can help by doing the following:
- Providing a complete view of your storage environment and a view into how your storage is getting consumed
- Displaying key storage metrics like total storage capacity, provisioned capacity, and more all from a single dashboard
- Generating storage capacity and performance reports across all your storage devices
- Offering multi-vendor storage device support
