Unisys has teamed up with software developer Storage Fusion Ltd to offer a global Storage Resource Analysis (SRA) service, designed to help companies optimize data-center efficiency and eliminate expensive storage costs. Through this service, businesses can use a portal to access a headline report on their system utilization, capacity allocation and disk tiering. The report includes an environmental module that shows power consumed by storage hardware down to individual disk drives. The report is free for companies with a minimum of 50TB of data.
This intelligence can help businesses reduce their power consumption by 50%, improve storage utilization by 30% and potentially save millions in annual IT costs. The intelligence will also equip CIOs with the information they need to plan the storage architecture that is right for their organizations, cut operational and unnecessary capital expenses and maximize the performance of their storage systems.
The SRA solution is intended to enable organizations to change the way they evaluate and optimize their storage environments. Using an innovative SaaS delivery model, the self-service portal can deliver detailed analytics within hours by cutting through the complexity of heterogeneous storage environments, according to Unisys.
This service is the result of a Unisys survey, published in 2009, that examined customer storage challenges. Unisys interviewed 80 leading European business managers and CIOs, each responsible for more than 400TB of data, from a wide cross-section of industries including the financial, public sector, utilities and transportation sectors. According to that survey, more than 40% of businesses have limited visibility, or almost none, into their existing data storage needs, and almost half struggle to forecast storage capacity. By contrast, best-practice storage utilization is typically around 75%. Based on direct feedback from the multiple large organizations surveyed, Unisys confirmed that only 20% of businesses achieve that level of utilization or above.
"From a consulting perspective, making sure that we really understood the issues was actually the key in terms of making sure that our strategy addressed what customers were looking for moving forward," Nikki Wilton, director of information and data management, Unisys, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Organizations struggle with storage complexity and cost because they often don't know what they actually have or what they really need, she observes. "Having gotten that information and understanding where the challenges were - and in my view storage is perhaps one of the least modernized parts of a data center infrastructure - we went out to the market to try and understand if there were any solutions out there that could assist our customers and enterprise clients with those needs and issues," Wilton explains.
"The goal of the Storage Fusion partnership is to assist our customers in identifying reclaimable assets and looking at opportunities for them to avoid costs moving forward," notes Wilton. "It is also to evaluate the infrastructure that they currently have in place, how that is configured, and understand whether there are any risks to their recovery time or recovery point objectives, in other words, delivering to the service level agreements that they have with a business."
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