openBench Labs Report Validates Onaro SANscreen Application Insight for Delivering Unparalleled Visibility into the Cost and Efficiency of Delivering Storage as a Service
BOSTON, MA – December 4, 2007 – Onaro, Inc. (http://www.onaro.com), the leader in datacenter automation for storage, today announced that openBench Labs, an independent product testing organization, has confirmed that Onaro’s SANscreen Application Insight uniquely empowers IT to align a SAN for maximum application performance at the lowest possible cost, by providing an automated solution for discovery, service monitoring and capacity management analysis. A key competitive differentiator is the construct of an access path. A recently published openBench Labs report details the benefits offered by Application Insight as a solution that enables IT to optimize storage as a service.
The report illustrates the results of openBench Labs’ comprehensive testing of Application Insight version 2.0 and confirms it successfully extends datacenter automation to storage with its real time, heterogeneous, service level views of the storage environment. Until now, storage management solutions focused on managing storage devices as individual assets. The problem for IT is that no matter how well storage is managed as an isolated asset, only limited value can be derived from the device, and this information is not sufficient to address the challenges to delivering IT support as a business service.
“Using Onaro SANscreen Application Insight, SAN administrators can look beyond device-centric traffic metrics and correlate overall SAN traffic with quality of service issues,” said Jack Fegreus, chief technology officer, openBench Labs. “Application Insight is more than a monitoring tool to resolve known issues. Building on the service intelligence engine of SANscreen Service Insight, real-time traffic data can be used to discover the root causes of problems before users are impacted.”
For the test scenario, openBench Labs installed SANscreen Service Insight, the baseline product for the SANscreen suite, along with the Application Insight 2.0 module on a dual-processor Intel® Xeon-based server running Windows Server® 2003 SP2. openBench Labs set out to collect and analyze fabric data from a proactive storage-service management perspective, rather than reactive asset maintenance perspective. The report confirmed that using SANscreen Service Insight with Application Insight, IT can successfully extend datacenter automation to storage. Organizations using SANscreen can 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. IT can provide a rigorously managed storage service that helps ensure that valued information is readily available, secure, and delivered at the lowest possible cost.
The review also identified the construct of an access path as a key competitive differentiator for Application Insight. An access path consists of physically connected resources, which represents a relationship between a particular application on a server, and its data on a storage device. This construct of a path is at the heart of the SANscreen architecture. Application Insight maps the traffic data measured by SAN switch ports to hosts, ISLs, and arrays. Application Insight’s unique ability to understand an application’s path to storage combined with device load information results in unparalleled visibility into the cost and efficiency of delivering storage services to an application. The result is lower capital costs through improved resource utilization, improved traffic balance, identification of orphaned resources, validation of tiered-storage strategies, and improved application performance.
“Corporate executives think in terms of business processes. When it comes to the services that they need to support those processes, they expect IT to address issues of availability, business continuity, performance, and security,” said Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing, Onaro, Inc. “This requires IT to automate datacenter processes for building, maintaining, optimizing and auditing storage networks. That means IT must be able to create policies and procedures that can effectively support a service level agreement (SLA) for storage-IT’s most costly asset. As the Open Labs report confirms, Application Insight provides the visibility IT needs to deliver on this objective.”
Where to Learn More
A free copy of the report is available for download here: http://www.onaro.com/wpreg/OpenBenchAI/
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.
# # #
