ZENfra – Optimize Storage

Optimize Storage and Repurpose Hardware with ZENfra

The continuing boom in data growth highlights the need to move storage solutions to new levels of performance and manageability. The challenge facing IT teams is not just how to store these vast volumes of data, but how to manage it to get full business value.

Leveraging the value of data is vital for improving customer service and competitive advantage, and it’s essential to the efficient, reliable performance of critical business operations. That makes storage optimization and secure access a priority.

One of the primary concerns for businesses moving storage is how to optimize storage & repurpose hardware assets. This concern can sometimes be so intense that it interrupts the project entirely. What are our options?

Here are four ways to optimize your storage and repurpose hardware assets.

1. Eliminate inefficient storage
2. Assess storage infrastructure
3. Automate assessment
4. Plan for optimization

Eliminate inefficient storage

While it’s clear that increasing data volumes require greater storage capacity, it’s also essential to categorize and manage storage so that users can access easily. However, ad-hoc growth and changing user demands may mean storage is not optimized.

Cost reduction is also a major challenge. Studies indicate that almost a third of a typical IT budget is spent on storage and around three quarters of that storage budget is spent on operational tasks.  Inefficiency is a major contributor with the majority of storage space taken by copies.

Assess storage infrastructure

Before taking measures to optimize storage, it’s essential to carry out infrastructure assessment to discover, understand and document your current environment. Many organizations operate legacy infrastructures with siloed structures, multiple vendors and a diverse range of storage devices. Infrastructure may also be under-utilized; older servers may not be turned off, for example, creating further inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.

The challenge is to consolidate the infrastructure to create a consistent environment that is simpler to manage and meets both business and operational requirements. An infrastructure assessment also acts as the basis for planning and optimizing future storage environments.

It provides a benchmark that storage teams can use to measure how well they are meeting their goals. The storage optimization plan will be based on real data, rather than guesswork, and will highlight priorities for the migration team.

The assessment should cover a number of aspects of your storage infrastructure. How does it meet current requirements in terms of service levels, capacity, performance and access? Can it scale to meet forecast future capacity levels? Does it meet compliance requirements, and how easy is it to monitor and detect problems.

Automate assessment

However, carrying out infrastructure assessment manually can be very time consuming and may not be completely accurate. VTG can provide a specialist tool that can provide teams with the information they need. VTG is a specialist in storage and infrastructure assessment and has developed a sophisticated tool - ZENfra™ – that can automate each stage of the process.

Until now, that tool has only been used by VTG professionals to manage infrastructure assessment and migration projects for clients. Now, VTG is making ZENfra available to in-house teams so that they can handle storage assessment and optimization more efficiently and eliminate the risk of human error.

Assessment automation tools like ZENfra reduce the complexity and risk of manual data capture by automating the collection of data from log files. ZENfra discovers all assets during scan, identifies underutilized assets and provides reports on capacity, performance and utilization. ZENfra processes the log files and creates a database with the required information. It benchmarks assessment against industry best practice and identifies areas for improvement

Plan for optimization

The assessment will provide greater visibility of your current infrastructure and highlight areas for performance improvement and potential cost savings. It will also provide a basis for planning a technology refresh or migration to a new environment in the cloud.

By using ZENfra, you can simplify and speed up storage optimization, repurpose underutilized assets and improves ROI on your storage infrastructure.

Find out more

If you would like to find out more about how ZENfra can help your storage optimization project, please contact  sales@virtualtechgurus.com.