Storage Management: Onaro Delivers Unprecedented Visibility Into The Alignment Of Storage Resources With Application Requirements

Onaro, Inc., one of the leader in storage service management, recently announced the immediate availability of SANscreen Application Insight 2.0, a powerful new enterprise-class application for aligning storage resources with application requirements. SANscreen Application Insight combines storage infrastructure utilization data with application path awareness to provide a complete application to array picture of storage resource utilization and efficiency. Using Application Insight, infrastructure teams can analyze storage tier assignments, load balance the entire application portfolio, and prevent application outages. The result is dramatically reduced capital costs through improved storage resource utilization and higher application service levels.

"Aligning storage resources to application requirements successfully and efficiently is a challenge for any infrastructure team," said Dave Russell, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. "Unfortunately, significant gaps remain in the storage resource management (SRM) segment around this capability. Solutions that effectively align resources to requirements should be considered for current SRM customers."

"Our SAN has been growing exponentially year-over-year and we needed a way to monitor its overall health which means acquiring insight into the utilization, performance, and paths of our storage ports," explained Jim Roskiewicz, manager of network services, Princeton Softech. "With Application Insight, we can chart performance over-time to determine where bottlenecks exist, analyze what triggers them, and understand their associations. This enables us to set policies, balance our SANs for performance and redundancy, and to use them optimally. This is visibility never before possible."

"Where Application Insight has been deployed at customer sites, users have identified significant application performance issues and uncovered a sizable amount of under-utilized assets." said Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing, Onaro Inc. "By aligning storage resources with application requirements, these customers have improved storage resource utilization and decreased the risks for application outages. Based on these results, we predict that Application Insight will achieve a near immediate ROI for customers."

SANscreen Application Insight Solution Details:

Application Insight's unique ability to understand an application's path to storage combined with device performance information results in unparalleled visibility into the cost and efficiency of delivering storage services to an application.

SANscreen Application Insight meets these objectives by:

• Analyzing storage tier assignments - Many organizations have implemented tiered storage plans. Unfortunately, many application owners over request storage tiers based on perceived performance needs. Application Insight equips storage managers with historical performance and throughput information to validate previous tier assumptions. Applications that are mismatched for their particular tier of service can be slated for migration with confidence that a tier change won't impact application performance.
• Load balancing the entire application portfolio across all storage resources - Application Insight collects port performance information across all the ports in the SAN using an "always on" data collection technique. By aggregating this data across all fabrics, switch and array ports, storage teams can make decisions about how to increase the utilization of their storage infrastructure. Deciding the optimal location for the next server, virtual machine, switch or array can be based on factual, historical data that leads to the optimal resource placement.
• Uncovering infrastructure related issues that cause application performance problems - Application Insight collects various host specific information including port throughput, errors, and traffic balance ratios between paths. By analyzing this information, storage, server and application teams can validate multi-path operations; perform congestion analysis; balance host traffic; and troubleshoot errors.

Availability and Pricing

Onaro SANscreen Application Insight version 2.0 is immediately available. Pricing for SANscreen Application Insight starts at $70 per port. Contact Onaro at 617.338.0068 or www.onaro.com for more details.

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.

SOURCE: Onaro, Inc.