INTRODUCTION

IT organizations deliver a broad array of services to their business customers on a daily basis. Among the most critical of these services is networked storage. IT storage teams must provide these storage services to the application teams based on specific capacity, access, recoverability and performance requirements. Delivering these storage services is a complex undertaking that occurs in an environment characterized by the following challenges:

• A highly distributed storage infrastructure
• High storage growth rates
• Corporate mergers and acquisitions that constantly change the nature and composition of the technology environment
• Lack of service policy definitions and visibility
• A storage team whose management tools are not effectively linked with the IT service delivery chain

Onaro® addresses these challenges with SANscreen®. SANscreen is a suite of products designed to align storage infrastructure with application requirements at the lowest possible cost – what Onaro calls Storage Service Management.

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.
• Utilization, availability, planning, and power pose cross domain operational issues.
• Virtual machine technology holds out the promise of great benefit but with increased risk

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.

SANscreen's real-time feedback enables IT storage teams to:

• Reduce capital asset purchases through improved capacity management
• Perform datacenter consolidations without risk
• Implement ITIL
• Improve service quality to reduce outages

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As a long-standing and trusted partner, NetSource works closely with a broad network of resellers, OEMs and other suppliers to meet customers' evolving data protection needs.

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