Onaro Launches New Products To Extend Datacenter Automation To Networked Storage
Capacity Manager 1.0, Provisioning Manager 1.0 and Updates to SANscreen Service Assurance Help Integrate Storage into Balance of Datacenter Operations
BOSTON, MA – September 4, 2007 - Onaro, Inc. (http://www.onaro.com), the leader in storage service management, announced today the immediate availability of SANscreen Capacity Manager 1.0, SANscreen Provisioning Manager 1.0, and updates to SANscreen Service Assurance. The combination of these products enables organizations to extend IT Service Management and IT Automation to networked storage with the goal of accelerating application delivery, reducing operating costs and trimming capital spending on storage by as much as 20%.
The Onaro SANscreen product suite includes Service Insight, Service Assurance, Application Insight, Replication Assurance, and now Capacity Manager 1.0 and Provisioning Manager 1.0. SANscreen is the most widely deployed datacenter automation solution for storage. It is currently in production in 20% of the Fortune 50, including the world’s largest retailer, entertainment company, commercial bank and health insurer. Onaro’s customers have successfully scaled SANscreen to support environments from 500 to over 70,000 ports.
Extending Datacenter Automation to Storage
While datacenter automation has already brought significant benefits to server and network management, it has largely bypassed networked storage. Storage Resource Management, solutions have evolved to focus mainly on data management while more classic datacenter automation solutions remain tightly focused on network and server automation. Networked storage can no longer be bypassed by datacenter automation.
Three trends will drive the integration of storage into the balance of datacenter operations:
- Storage resources now represent up to 45% of the infrastructure budget in many large enterprises. Networked storage is no longer a small, isolated island of spending and resource deployment.
- Utilization, availability, planning, and power pose cross domain operational issues. The same operation processes used for network and server management need to be applied to storage to solve these challenges.
- Virtual machine technology holds out the promise of great benefit but with increased risk for both the physical and virtual infrastructure.Successful virtual machine implementation will require a truly cross-domain approach to achieve optimal business impact.
Extending datacenter automation to networked storage requires a foundation built on real time, cross vendor infrastructure configuration information that can be transformed into a true service level view of storage. This service level view serves as the baseline of information to coordinate the building, management, optimization and audit of storage services.
“Storage management must become integrated into mainstream datacenter operations for organizations to get to the next level of efficiencies and cost reduction,” said Dave Russell, vice president, Gartner, Inc. “There is significant low-hanging fruit that can be captured around cost reduction, operational efficiencies and service-quality improvements for IT groups that can successfully integrate these two parts of the datacenter.”
SANscreen from Onaro successfully extends datacenter automation to storage with its real time, heterogeneous, service level views of the storage environment. Organizations using SANscreen manage storage as a true end-to-end IT service. SANscreen’s actionable service level information is consumable by both storage teams and non-technical storage users, effectively integrating storage into the entire IT service delivery chain.
"As a leader in data center automation software, BladeLogic values Onaro’s focus on providing innovative automation solutions which simplify storage management, one of the key components of the data center,” said Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO, BladeLogic. “We are pleased to have Onaro as a data center alliance partner.”
To further enable datacenter automation for storage, Onaro is announcing the general availability of Application Dashboard, Capacity Manger and Provisioning Manager.
New Application Dashboard Provides Application Teams with Storage Service Visibility
Application Dashboard, a new feature of SANscreen Service Assurance, provides application management teams with visibility into the service levels delivered by the storage environment. With Application Dashboard, application managers, front line support teams, storage managers and infrastructure executives can all reference the same easy to understand status board on the health of storage service delivery.
New Capacity Manager 1.0 Increases Asset Utilization by 10% or More
For large, distributed datacenters, understanding the allocation of resources to an application is no small tasks. With multiple vendors, hundreds of switches, tens of arrays, and hundreds of hosts, tracking the utilization of the assets with manual processes is time consuming and inaccurate. In addition, as more and more organizations seek to implement more sophisticated tiering schemes based on disk speed, disk type or redundancy, manual tracking schemes quickly become unworkable. SANscreen Capacity Manager 1.0 solves these issues with:
- Real time global allocation information by datacenter, by tier, and by business unit to improve forecasting by the capacity planning team;
- Global charge back information to reduce capital costs and increases utilization for use by finance teams; and
- Automated tiering assignment rules to manage complex service tiering schemes.
Early users of SANscreen Capacity Manager increased asset utilization by 10% or more through improved visibility into resource allocation.
New Provisioning Manager 1.0 Reduces Storage Provisioning Time by 20% While Reducing Standby Capacity by 30% or More
Determining available storage resources to support provisioning new applications is a complex and time consuming process for large enterprises. A typical large enterprise may have a storage provisioning target of four days, but only achieve this service level goal 25% of the time. Delays are caused by the search for appropriate storage, the requirement to run all requests through a senior storage manager, and lack of transparency into resource reservations for future projects. In addition, most organizations maintain storage resource buffers of 30-40% to compensate for poor visibility into immediate storage demands. According to Onaro’s ROI studies, each 1% of unused capacity in a typical large enterprise datacenter (800 TB in size with 2000 switch ports) represents approximately $100,000 of non-performing capital assets.For organizations working to implement a tiering strategy, this standby capacity can be even higher given the greater variability of required assets.
SANscreen Provisioning Manager 1.0 works to accelerate application provisioning time and reduce standby capacity by:
- Enabling application owners such as DBAs to reserve new storage space directly;
- Creating an accurate service tier reservation forecast based on actual demand;
- Implementing a repeatable, simplified process for creating provisioning plans for even the most complex tiered storage environments; and
- Integrating with customer specific provisioning systems.
Early users of Provisioning Manager reduced storage provisioning time by 20% while reducing standby capacity by 30%. “SANscreen Capacity Manager 1.0 and Provisioning Manager 1.0 will allow me to track future and current storage requirements with little effort,” said Michael Passe, storage architect at CareGroup Health Systems. “Using these applications, I expect to reduce delays in the provisioning process, and deliver transparency into the provisioning process for my customers.”
“Rising capital costs, environmental issues, and virtualization are key datacenter challenges that can’t be solved with storage resource management applications,” said Doug McNary, president and CEO of Onaro. “Some of the largest datacenter operators in the world are using SANscreen to solve these challenges by integrating storage into the balance of IT operations. We are committed to delivering solutions that extend datacenter automation to storage with the goal of reducing capital costs, delivery costs and increasing overall service quality.”
Pricing and Availability
Capacity Manager 1.0, Provisioning Manager 1.0 and Service Assurance 4.0 are available now. Capacity Manager 1.0 and Provisioning Manager 1.0 are priced starting at $250 per TB. Service Assurance 4.0 pricing starts at $185 per port.
About Onaro, Inc.
Onaro is the leader in storage service management (SSM) enabling enterprises to increase service quality, return on storage, and compliance by managing storage as a service. Unlike traditional SRM applications which are device centric, Onaro provides a clear service view into a SAN’s access paths, redundancy, replication and performance. SANscreen is being used by the world’s largest companies in banking, retail, entertainment, data communications and wireless telecom. A partial customer list includes AOL, CareGroup Healthcare System, JetBlue Airways, Priority Healthcare, State Street Global Advisors, and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. For more information, please visit www.onaro.com.
