Storage Optimization solution overview
Storage teams continually seek actionable analytics that can be used to eliminate inefficient storage utilization. Growing storage requirements and shrinking budgets demand on-going processes. The Storage Optimization solution identifies both on-prem and cloud resources that may be reclaimable or that can be optimized.
Analytics can be used to find dark storage, in an effort to contain costs and delay/avoid purchases. By examining collected historical data for multiple data points, Storage Optimization provides visibility into storage utilization over time, with true analytics that support infrastructure rightsizing. Already collected data is leveraged to deliver a detailed storage utilization perspective. For example, while collecting data from storage arrays, the system can use the LUN-to-host mapping to retrieve additional host details, such as the capacity that has been allocated to a host. Often storage allocated to a host never gets used.
The following scenarios represent a sampling of challenges faced by data center teams:
Decommissioned hosts leave behind storage that is never de-provisioned.
Overprovisioned hosts may offer candidates for storage reclamation.
VMs that are not in the VM inventory consume disks in datastores.
Temporary VM snapshots are forgotten, yet their files consume space.
Idle and powered-off VMs continue to have storage allocated to them.
Expensive tier-1 storage contains files that should be migrated to less expensive storage.
LUN reclamation opportunities can be realized by identifying unallocated LUNs, allocated but undiscovered LUNs, discovered but unused LUNs, and LUNs that have had no activity in the past 30 days.
Mergers, acquisitions, and migrations require illumination of storage usage.
To learn how to use the Storage Optimization solution to address common use cases, explore the following:
See Understand the value of Storage Optimization historical data.