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Storage Horizon
MonoSphere
®
Storage Horizon
®

is an enterprise-class software solution providing
Global 3000 companies with a unified view of current and projected storage capacity
usage, giving companies the insight to effectively manage storage capacity and maxi-
mize utilization of existing and future storage assets. Storage demand has been too
difficult to project, causing administrators to significantly overprovision storage to
avoid shortages. This has resulted in uneconomical average storage utilization. Storage
Horizon helps IT organizations directly target this expensive low utilization problem,
achieve greater value from their existing storage assets, significantly reduce capital
spending, and reduce operational expenditures such as power, cooling and floor space.
Storage Horizon

Storage Capacity Management

Agent-less software solution for optimally managing
and planning storage growth
MonoSphere provides agent-
less storage capacity manage-
ment software that enables
Global 3000 companies to
forecast, plan and optimize
their storage capacity. Pro-
viding unprecedented vis-
ibility into an organizations
storage resources and its
consumption, MonoSpheres
award-winning Storage
Horizon software dramati-
cally reduces spending on
storage infrastructure and
eases the management burden
of explosive storage growth
by enabling storage adminis-
trators to manage by storage
utilization versus storage
allocation.
Storage CapEx Has Risen Too High
Many companies have a capacity management process in place to manage service levels and to control
costs for their networks and servers, yet many overlook the fastest growing component of the IT infra-
structure storage. While storage may appear to be highly affordable, in reality the opposite is true. Even
as storage prices continue to decline 25 percent annually, demand continues to rise 50 percent or more
due to exponential growth of storage consumption by applications, compliance requirements, and data
protection strategies. This results in alarming storage spending increases of 10 to 15 percent every year. In
most businesses, storage costs are rising faster than IT budgets and have become a financial burden that
is impacting the rollout of major company initiatives
1
.
Storage Capacity Planning Challenges
Storage usage has been difficult to project due to the creation and change rate of data and the size and
complexity of storage infrastructures. Out of the tens of thousands of individual file systems and databas-
es that consume storage infrastructures, some are highly utilized, while others have plenty of extra space.
Some experience explosive growth, while others remain flat. Efficiently managing the sheer number and
heterogeneity of these different storage elements with existing tools has proven to be impossible. This
complexity has left administrators with no choice but to overprovision storage to avoid shortages. Based
on the many petabytes of production data analyzed by MonoSphere, this ad-hoc approach results in a
wasteful average storage utilization of 30 percent. Despite this, organizations still run into the occasional
fire drill from a specific application running out of capacity.
So, is there a more effective way to manage storage capacity?
Purpose-Built for Systematic Capacity Management
Solving this issue requires an investment in a systematic capacity management solution. Systematic
capacity management is a set of consistent, well-defined IT processes. Best in class storage capacity
management consists of the following processes:
::
product brochure
1
Monosphere 2006 survey of 140 storage professionals. Storage Horizon Storage Capacity Management Collect storage related meta information from storage systems (storage supply) and application
hosts (storage demand). Best in class processes do this without the use of installing software
agents on all your hosts.

Associate host volumes with storage system logical devices, including consideration for RAID
protection levels, clustering, host virtualization, snapshots, and replication, at both host and
storage systems. This enables the determination of true usage of each logical device (LUN) and
the overall array.

Baseline your current utilization and usage and develop future goals.

Forecast future utilization for each volume, database, file system, and logical device after a number of
collections have been completed.

Analyze your current and projected storage environment.

Plan for future provisions and purchases by developing a storage capacity plan to optimize what to
buy, when to buy it, and where to deploy it.

Enterprise-Wide Monitoring of your storage capacity to ensure that changes in storage
consumption dont cause emergency situations.
Fast Time to Value
Storage Horizon installs in less than 15 minutes on a Windows server and does not use host or storage
resident software agents. Rather, it leverages industry standard protocols, such as WMI, SSH, and SMI-S,
as well as vendor provided interfaces, to perform automatic data collection to deliver information for
all storage assets. With a few mouse clicks, you can set the time of day and frequency of the automatic
data collection on an individual element, group, or enterprise level. The pre-configured analytic storage
reports makes sure you have a fast start and can immediately get a baseline view of your current
capacity and potential utilization trouble spots.
Dramatically Increase Storage Utilization

Identify and re-direct dark storage Identify and re-direct dark storage to areas of need saves
capital and significantly increases storage utilization.

Allow data to grow into existing storage safely Focus future storage provisioning and purchases
only for required areas. Over-provisioned areas will increase utilization as more and more data gets
written to them.

Reclaim over-provisioned storage Depending on the data growth rate of over-provisioned areas,
it may be worthwhile to re-claim storage from over-provisioned areas if the size of the re-claimed
storage is large enough many times re-capturing TBs or more.
Automatically Generate of Storage Capacity Plans and Budgets
From data collected daily, Storage Horizon calculates storage utilization, growth, and detailed forecasts.
Based on these, it automatically generates storage capacity plans for storage arrays to desired
utilization levels by calculating:

When additional storage needs to be provisioned By comparing forecasts to user definable
thresholds, Storage Horizon calculates when to provision additional storage for each logical device to
stay within desired utilization levels.

How much storage is required Storage Horizon calculates the optimal amount of storage to provision.
Key Benefits for IT Managers
::
Reduce storage infrastructure
spending by as much as 50
percent.
::
Reduce storage energy and data
center costs by as much as 50
percent.
Key Benefits for Storage Teams
::
Automate data collection and
analysis for storage environment
reporting.
::
Understand how youre meeting
corporate usage goals through
high level and detailed views of
your storage environment.
::
Calculate the storage costs of
applications, business units,
departments, etc.
::
Determine when additional
provisions or purchases are re-
quired by analyzing how storage
is configured and used by hosts,
VMware servers, databases, and
storage systems.
::
Quickly locate the best available
storage to provide hosts which
are configured to satisfy applica-
tion requirements.
::
Proactively identify when new
provisions are necessary and
locate disks where new storage
can be provisioned.
::
Avoid emergency out-of-hours
provisioning or purchases by
receiving early warning of poten-
tial out-of-storage problems.
::
Develop clear, accurate, and
objective cost justification for
future storage purchases. Storage Horizon Storage Capacity Management
I like what MonoSphere is
talking about -- mainframe-
caliber capacity planning
tools for open-system envi-
ronments.
Steve Duplessie, Founder and
Senior Analyst, ESG
The need for an enterprise
storage capacity planning
and forecasting solution
is a top priority for Storage
professionals, it is consis-
tently listed as a top pain
and the products in use
today are overwhelmingly
homegrown, inaccurate
and late to meeting business
needs.
Robert Stevenson, Managing
Director for Storage Research,
TheInfoPro
Every storage team will soon
need the advantages that
MonoSpheres systematic ap-
proach to capacity planning
can provide.
Brad ONeill, Senior Analyst

If additional storage needs to be purchased - Storage Horizon
determines if additional storage needs to be purchased, when
to purchase, and how much to purchase. It will also take into
account the time to purchase and deploy storage.

How much new storage will cost incorporating user
supplied storage unit cost information, Storage Horizon
calculates the storage financial plan that becomes an
important input to the IT budget.
Storage Horizon provides the user with a financial What If
capability which allows administrators to adjust utilization
thresholds up or down and immediately see the projected financial
impact on their CapEx budget.
Analyze the Environment Storage Analytics and Daily Usage Monitoring and Forecasting
In medium to large sized storage infrastructures, there are thousands to hundreds of thousands of storage
elements with different levels of utili