Effective application performance management (APM) is fundamental to business success. Businesses are relying on applications for differentiated end customer experiences, smoother internal collaboration, and for innovation. Fundamental to making sure that business critical applications are running smoothly (i.e. they are receiving sufficient levels of performance, capacity and uptime), is ensuring that storage is also running smoothly. Data needs to be placed on the storage infrastructure resource that is most appropriate for its capacity and performance requirements. Additionally, there is a need to refine capacity planning while also minimizing and quickly resolving storage bottlenecks. The problem is that most IT professionals do not have the proper tools to gain the insight they require, into their storage environment, to facilitate smoother and more cost-effective storage operations.
Part of the challenge inherent in obtaining better visibility into and control over the storage environment is that this is not easy in a world that relies on multiple storage systems to solve a variety of needs. Typically, vendors will advise buying either additional capacity or a faster-performing (read: more expensive) storage array to solve application performance issues. However, this approach quickly gets out of hand from a budgetary perspective. Before deciding to invest in additional infrastructure, it is important for storage managers to be able to identify potential hot spots that exist, both within and outside of the storage infrastructure, which may be slowing application performance. To do so, storage managers require a tool that provides visibility and data correlation across storage systems, as well as across the entire application stack.
It is also important to ensure that the storage infrastructure has been “right-sized.” Firstly, there are very likely to be older files that may be archived to a lower-cost storage tier or deleted entirely, thus freeing up capacity on faster-performing systems. Secondly, it is important to be able to accurately plan for storage resource refreshes and expansions. This helps to ensure that new systems are appropriately sized for upcoming requirements, avoiding both over and under-provisioning.
Finally, centralizing and simplifying management across various storage infrastructures is fundamental to smoother storage operations. This empowers IT to be able to tier data appropriately and to obtain visibility into hotspots and bottlenecks.
Access Storage Switzerland’s on demand webinar with SolarWinds, “3 Steps to be a Storage Superhero – How to Slash Storage Costs,” to learn more about how to leverage storage resource management to cut costs while at the same time improving application availability and performance.
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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I guess for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account.
I look forward to new updates and will share this blog with my Facebook group.
Talk soon!