MonoSphere announced Storage Horizon 3.7 with a range of analytical capabilities, which reduce the complexity and time required to manage today’s heterogeneous storage environments. Storage Horizon 3.7 includes enhanced support for VMware environments, a new automated chargeback capability, advanced analytics, advanced analysis of storage consumed by databases, and adds support for EMC Celerra and IBM DS and ESS arrays.

De-Mystifying VMware Storage Consumption
This version offers enhanced support for VMware server virtualization, helping storage teams understand to what extent and how rapidly applications running on guest operating systems are consuming storage at the array level. Storage Horizon 3.7 visualizes storage abstractions and analyzes how VMware hosts are using storage, allowing IT departments to view storage usage details and the relationships between array LUNs, ESX servers, VMware file systems (VMFS), VMware virtual disks (VMDK), guest operating systems (OS), and guest OS file systems/raw devices, determining when additional storage is optimally required.

Automated Chargeback Analysis
Storage Horizon 3.7 automates chargeback reporting with a new set of capabilities. IT assets, both logical and physical, can be grouped by business unit, department, application, hardware, and other parameters. These assets are then analyzed to show costs of configured raw storage and actual array usage. The comprehensive view includes the chargeback groups’ hosts, arrays, and LUNs; the total configured raw and configured usable storage; usage and utilization; and calculations of the cost of raw configured and unused storage. This enhanced capability enables internal customers to understand storage consumption and adherence to corporate financial goals.

Advanced Analytical Capabilities
Storage Horizon 3.7 includes a series of pre-configured advanced analytical reports that take dead aim at wasted, unused, and under-utilized storage assets. They are designed to ensure that storage consumers use allocated storage efficiently. Such automated analytics include storage consumption by volume group, free pool report, LUN to disk analysis, and dark storage breakdown. These analyses can help administrators pinpoint available LUNs that meet application requirements, provide advanced notice when more storage will be needed, help identify on which disks new LUNs can be provisioned, and more. Additional new capabilities include automated scheduling and distribution of analytical reports. These new features help improve utilization and enable storage teams to provide the required storage resources to meet business needs.

Enhanced Analysis of Database Storage Consumption
Storage Horizon 3.7 includes advanced features for analyzing storage consumption of Oracle, MS SQL, and Sybase databases, as well as MS Exchange. For Oracle databases, users can “drill down” into the database to see details and forecasts of its table spaces and data files and view log allocations. Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) allows Storage Horizon to recognize the single database across a cluster of hosts, as well as analyze, forecast, and report the database storage usage as a single database. For MS SQL and Sybase databases, drill-down reveals information on multiple databases to see data versus log information. For Exchange, users can drill down and see details of InfoStore’s public folder rollups and mailbox rollups.

New Storage Hardware Support
This release provides support for IBM System Storage DS and ESS series of arrays, and the EMC Celerra family of filers. For these and all other supported storage hardware, Storage Horizon offers detailed, automated analysis, which includes developing optimized storage capacity plans, allowing users to grow into existing capacity without purchasing additional storage; identifying dark storage that can be re-directed to areas in need of additional capacity; pinpointing over-provisioned areas, so wasted storage can be reclaimed; and providing early warning of potential over-utilization issues before they become out-of-storage emergencies.

“Storage teams are always trying to answer questions such as who is consuming storage, how fast usage is growing, how much storage is costing the company, but trying to manually correlate that information can be time-consuming and is subject to human error. In order to effectively manage a growing storage environment effectively, IT needs to leverage software to collect, correlate and perform the analysis on the storage environment, and quickly and easily generate reports,” said Bob Laliberte, storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “With MonoSphere's agentless Storage Horizon software, storage usage can be determined across a heterogeneous environment, and it also provides comprehensive capacity management analysis. This includes advanced forecasting, chargeback reporting and detailed cost implications for data protection strategies or unused data.”

“We see the benefits of Storage Horizon in real-world customer environments every day, specifically because of its ability to determine storage array usage through its agent-less server, application, and storage system data collection, association, and analytical processes,” said Frank Kettenstock, vice president of marketing at MonoSphere. “MonoSphere customers can decrease storage capital expenditures by as much as 50 percent and drastically reduce operational expenditures, including power, cooling and data center floor space. By listening closely to our innovative users, we have built new comprehensive capabilities to once again raise the bar in the industry.”