Cut It Costs Through Virtualization Using Profiler
In today's economy, companies are struggling to control costs.
IT departments are being asked, even required, to do more with their current resources, the goal being to maximize the use and effectiveness of their infrastructures. Organizations are pursuing this goal in several ways: * Virtualized Servers * Optimizing Resources * Reclaiming Storage * Condensing Responsibilities
Virtualization Management Made Easy
As resources are stretched, managing them is more critical and more difficult. Virtualization can hide performance issues and confuse storage management. Administrators trying to maintain their SLAs can quickly lapse into reactive mode, delaying true management of the environment by focusing on the immediate issue without a view of the big picture. Often reactive management leads to further complications and inefficiency. Home grown scripts and tools quickly become outdated as technology and personnel change. In these conditions, an ineffectual and incomplete evaluation of the environment is made by management, and future forecasts are based on inaccurate or incomplete data.
Control of your Infrastructure - Physical and Virtualized
Accessing information and getting visibility into the operations of an IT environment shouldn’t be difficult. The reality is that it is difficult, unfortunately. Particularly in diverse, heterogeneous, and distributed environments made up of storage, servers, and applications from different vendors and serving different purposes. Further complicating this issue are native tools that provide limited visibility, and often only into the devices they’re bundled with, preventing administrators and managers from seeing those devices and their performance as related to the larger networked environment.
A solution to this issue would be a simple and easy-to-use tool that provides end-to-end, actionable visibility into the IT infrastructure, and that also enables cost savings and optimization. This is exactly where Tek-Tools Profiler steps in. Profiler provides a wealth of information, but how do you align the information to your cost control strategies and alleviate the pain to implement and monitor them?
Profiler can identify opportunities for storage reclamation and resource optimization, allowing you to leverage those opportunities into real storage, performance, space, and power savings. Profiler taps the same data collected to provide management with forecasting and trending, as well as categorization information to help make proper decisions relative to organizational needs. With Profiler, customers have reclaimed an average of 30% of their storage that was unused or wasted. For every terabyte of reclaimed storage, organizations save approximately $10,000. The average Tek-Tools customer realizes an ROI of up to 40% within three to six months.
Illustrated below are 10 ways you can reclaim or repurpose resources in your organization's environment.
1. Server Consolidation - Profiler identifies candidates for virtualization via its server consolidation reports, allowing organizations to retire hardware, reduce power consumption, streamline management, and free up rack space. 2. Recover Resources in the Virtualized Infrastructure: 1. Identify unused virtual machines that can be turned off in order to reclaim performance capacity, or deleted in order to reclaim storage. 2. Find orphaned VMDK files that can be deleted, freeing space and improving performance. 3. Expose virtual machines with over-allocated resources (storage, CPU, memory, etc.) that can be released back into the virtual infrastructure. 3. Array Capacity Reclamation - find storage on arrays that is unused or allocated but free: If you are leveraging your storage fully, you can retire storage you don't need anymore, and put off future purchases of additional storage. 4. Clean Your Files – Do you know what files can be archived or deleted? Identify files and directories by age, size, and ownership that can be relocated or removed, reducing primary storage usage, backup size, and duration, as well as disaster recovery requirements. 5. Snapshot and Mirror management – Do you know how much storage you are using for snapshots and mirrors? If the protection policies exceed your SLAs or recovery point objectives, you could be consuming production storage with copies of data you don’t need. 6. Identify Thin Provisioning Candidates - Discover file systems using a fraction of their allocated storage and that are growing slowly. 7. Tier Your Storage – Do you know when you can move your storage to less expensive tiers? Identify storage that can be moved to other tiers based on usage and performance, and either free up your performance storage for I/O hungry applications, or add less expensive storage in your next capital expenditure. 8. Save Time - Are your administrators tracking storage the old way - with manual processes and populating outdated spreadsheets? Profiler can alleviate the data collection, correlation, and dissemination of reports with automation, allowing administrators to focus on productive tasks. 9. Grouping and Reports - Do you need to perform budgetary planning, charge other departments for your storage or size your DR site (plus growth)? Profiler allows you to group resources in ways that serve your business needs and meet your business objectives of maximizing the use and effectiveness of IT resources and budgets. 10. Profiler can identify underutilized backup resources, as well as identify old and stagnant data that can be removed, freeing storage, reducing the size of backups, and enabling you to maximize the use of tape drives and media servers, so that money doesn’t have to be spent needlessly.
Consultants or employees are often tasked by companies to track storage utilization, collect performance and storage trending, and track backup failures, all manually. All too often this leads to an incomplete an ineffectual view of IT, as these efforts are ineffective, inefficient, and complex. Today's economy aside, companies cannot afford these unproductive and futile methods of managing IT resources.
Optimize Your IT Resources
Under these circumstances, a solid and proven reporting, monitoring, and forecasting tool is invaluable. Real insight into what resources are available, and metrics on uses is necessary and vital data that administrators and managers require to optimize their IT infrastructure. A storage resource management suite like Tek-Tools Profiler enables organizations to do more with less, freeing up time for core tasks and utilizing resources in the most cost effective manner possible.
Tek-Tools Software is a recognized leader in the IT resource management software space. Its client list includes companies from the Fortune 50 to Fortune 5000, all of whom now use Tek-Tools' software solutions to gain visibility into their physical and virtual IT Infrastructures.
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