Drive down cost of enterprise storage, improve performance with SANscreen

Storage systems remain one of the most costly expenses within today's modern IT environment. It is with this that Blue Turtle Technologies has partnered with storage giant NetApp, and is now offering its SANscreen storage management software to help businesses drive cost containment and improve storage efficiency.

At a recent event hosted in Johannesburg, Blue Turtle and NetApp showed guests the capabilities of SANscreen, highlighting how this heterogeneous storage management system allows you to manage your disparate storage devices from a single interface.

The software is hardware agnostic and allows storage administrators and executives alike to manage their storage systems, evaluate risks in their storage, and in turn better plan their future requirements through a single dashboard.

“As digital and electronic information being created and processed by organisations grows, so does the need for improved storage management capabilities,” says Gray Farrell, Business Development Manager at Blue Turtle. “To help local businesses cope with this need, we have partnered with a known global technology vendor with a proven solution, that will assist our customers to get a better understanding of their storage requirements.”

SANscreen enables the user to improve the quality and efficiency of their storage management efforts through the automation of the data centre. The product is a near real-time, multivendor, multiprotocol system that offers a service-level view of your storage environment. When implemented SANscreen will offer a single view of your storage architecture, no matter how many disparate devices, branches, or disks you run in your IT environment.

The result is that, as an organisation, you can begin reducing capital purchases through improved capacity management, improve service quality to reduce outages, perform data centre consolidations without risk, implement ITIL improvements related to your SAN environment, and ultimately maximise the success of virtualisation projects.

“In short, the SANscreen software is an affordable way in which to instantly gain control of your storage environment. The product provides, manages and views capabilities to improve forecasting, storage tiering, and charge backs. It also helps with better capacity planning, reductions in redundancy and offers a single point of failure. I think the most significant feature of toolset is that it eliminates the need to buy a host of separate tools to manage a heterogeneous storage environment,” adds Farrell.

The product is priced around the number of ports, servers and/or Terabytes within your storage environment, making it affordable for different sized businesses. Its modular nature also allows you to purchase what you need now, and then add separate functionality as your system or business needs grow. Additionally it boasts exceptional speed to delivery and a typical 2 000-port data centre can be installed within 24 hours, meaning you have access to actionable data from day one.

The product range currently comprises:

* Service insight - a tool that offers near real-time visibility into the “storage services” delivered by your storage infrastructure.
* Service assurance - allows you to deliver storage as a true end-to-end service with path-based service policies, violations, and change-planning capabilities.
* Application insight - a performance management tool that improves resource use and application performance by aligning your storage resources with application service levels.
* Capacity manager - a way to achieve better capacity utilisation so you make smart capacity purchase decisions and simplify your storage resource allocation.
* VM insight - enables you to maximise server consolidation projects while minimising the risk of increased storage costs in VM implementations.

“The SANscreen product is a great success story, we have been able to assist customers around the globe not only to better manage their storage infrastructure, but also their storage costs. It is an easy to deploy and cost-effective tool that takes the headache out of disparate storage management. Real-world SANscreen deployments currently support from 500 to over 70 000 Fibre Channel ports and over 50PB,” says Ted Banz, Director, NetApp Software Sales Group EMEA at NetApp.