DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software today announced Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer from Hitachi Data Systems, now provides detailed monitoring of DataCore SANsymphony-V environments. Through tight integration of the software, enterprises can gain a holistic, single-pane view of their entire data center – including virtualized storage resources, servers, networks and applications – enabling IT administrators to easily maintain high levels of infrastructure availability, performance and conduct fast problem diagnosis and resolution.
The DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor enhances the value of diverse storage resources by unifying advanced services such as provisioning, auto-tiering, replication and performance acceleration, all through a common storage virtualization layer. Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer is an integrated availability and performance monitoring tool that can reduce complexity, streamline operations and increase IT staff efficiency. It monitors availability and performance of heterogeneous physical and virtual server stacks, applications and network and storage devices via a single screen.
Through the integrated solution, SANsymphony-V plugs into IT Operations Analyzer, which regularly requests inventory data and updates from the storage hypervisor. This populates the single monitoring screen of IT Operations Analyzer with the latest information, keeping IT administrators abreast of meaningful changes in resources, alerting them to potential problems for proactive resolution, while offering a host of additional benefits.
“Maintaining a highly available, responsive data center has been a challenge, especially in environments with both physical and virtualized resources,” said Carlos Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development for DataCore Software. “Through our efforts with Hitachi, IT administrators can now see their entire infrastructure and receive intelligence that ensures greater performance, better decision-making and an ability to do more with less.”
“The combination of these best-of-breed technologies creates a much-needed solution for our customers,” added Frank Amato, director, Global Sales and Marketing, IT Operations Software, Hitachi Data Systems. “IT Operations Analyzer has long offered a single-pane, multi-device view, and by harnessing DataCore’s storage hypervisor for that critical area, IT administrators gain the ability to simply and effectively monitor the complete data center.”
The Virtual Reality
One of the most pressing reasons for a more comprehensive monitoring approach stems from the rapid transition to virtual servers and virtual desktops occurring amongst enterprises in recent years. Yet, in reality, virtualization initiatives have been marked by unexpected bottlenecks and single points of failures.
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor overcomes many of these problems by insulating users and applications from the constant upheaval in the underlying storage devices and physical plant where they reside. IT Operations Analyzer monitors the interrelated components that make up a dynamic, virtualized data center, maintaining an inventory of the many elements and collecting vital status and alerts from each.
By using SANsymphony-V and IT Operations Analyzer together, administrators can now monitor every device in their data center infrastructure on a single screen, easily identifying issues and taking steps to proactively resolve problems before they impact productivity.
Reduced Downtime, Increased Productivity, Ease-of-Use
Monitoring the entire data center from a single console saves time and simplifies the management process, resulting in faster issue resolution, increased performance and improved availability. Here are just a few of the key benefits offered through the integration of SANsymphony and IT Operations Analyzer:
- Fast Problem Diagnosis & Resolution: the dashboard of IT Operations Analyzer features proactive alerting and a root cause analysis (RCA) engine. With built-in intelligence, RCA enables IT administrators to reduce mean time to diagnose problems by up to 90 percent, and with the ability to process large numbers of event alerts in minutes, issues can be addressed as soon as they arise. Also, RCA provides data that helps determine the probability that specific devices are causing such issues.
- Isolating Bottlenecks, Elevating Performance: IT Operations Analyzer allows thresholds to be set on devices to prevent bottlenecks, ranging from metrics like voltage levels to server performance metrics such as CPU load. When reached, action can be taken to avoid slow application response or cause outages. Congestion points can also be isolated. For instance, if there is reduced performance in a set of servers, the single-pane console might show too many competing for the same resource. Administrators can then easily fix the issue by using SANsymphony-V to redistribute workloads.
- Ease-of-Use: When enterprises become more server- or application-centric, they often reduce staff dedicated to storage, even though performance depends on how well it is provisioned and protected. The integration of SANsymphony-V into IT Operations Analyzer provides visibility into storage assets that enables staff to intuitively identify issues—without a high level of storage expertise— and resolve these before productivity suffers. In fact, in most cases, administrators gain actionable information allowing for informed decisions that actually boost performance and availability.
Availability
The DataCore SANsymphony-V plug in for Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer will be available in February 2012.