Onaro, Inc. announced new solutions to extend its support for the virtualized data center and further integrate storage with IT operations. The adoption of server and storage virtualization by large enterprises has created new challenges integrating networked storage into the balance of IT operations. New and updated products in the SANscreen product family are designed to meet this challenge by providing end-to-end service visibility for both physical and virtual servers across SAN and now also NAS networked storage environments.

While server and storage virtualization are being deployed to reduce costs, each of these technologies adds management challenges for data center teams. Server virtualization requires cross domain optimization of both the server and storage environment to maximize cost savings and ensure service levels are met. Storage virtualization requires additional end-to-end visibility from the application to the back-end storage devices to optimize capacity planning and ensure application availability.

Enhancements to Service Insight, along with new NAS Insight, VM Insight, and new Array Performance Module for Application Insight, meet these challenges and integrate NAS and SAN into the balance of IT operations. The result is lower capital cost for server virtualization projects of 20% or more and a 50% decrease in application outage risk. In addition, organizations can now more effectively integrate networked storage into IT operations to reduce application provisioning times, improve cross domain trouble shooting and support broader ITSM initiatives.

“The virtualized data center requires a different approach to infrastructure management that emphasizes a cross domain, service level view of the environment,” said Dave Russell, vice president of research, Gartner. “To maximize the return while minimizing the risks of large scale deployment of virtualization technology, all infrastructure teams – storage and server – need to work off a common service view of the supporting infrastructure. Only by adopting this common view can organizations advance to the next level of operational efficiency and cost cutting.”

With VMs concentrating the storage I/O requirements of several physical servers to a single server, balancing loads from application to disk is critical to meet consolidation targets without impacting application performance. A new Array Performance Module for Application Insight discovers, collects, and maintains array performance information. This data is added to the fabric traffic information collected by Application Insight. With the new Array Performance Module, Application Insight users are able to see complete host-to-disk application load visibility. By intelligently monitoring storage and server performance during consolidations, organizations can reduce capital costs by an additional 20% or more by optimizing physical to virtual server compression ratios.

NAS Insight 1.0 is a new addition to the SANscreen product family designed to support enterprise NAS deployments. For organizations deploying multiple filers to support enterprise applications and VMs, NAS Insight 1.0 provides global visibility across all networked attached systems through a single pane of glass. For organizations deploying VMs on networked attached storage, this common view is critical to meeting service level objectives.

Service Insight 4.5 has been enhanced to provide service path visibility for companies deploying storage virtualization technologies. This service path visibility starts from the virtual host and continues through the entire networked storage environment including switches, virtual storage devices, arrays, volumes, and finally disks. By deploying Service Insight 4.5, organizations can take advantage of SANscreen’s ability to reduce capital costs, decrease operating costs and improve service quality in a highly virtualized environment. As part of this release, Service Insight will support virtualization technologies from IBM, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Incipient.

“Virtualization technology introduces fresh demands for server and storage teams to integrate their operations more closely,” said Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing, Onaro, Inc. “These new and upgraded SANscreen products enable the close cooperation required of data center teams to effectively deploy virtualization technologies across both SAN and NAS environments.”