By Kevin Komiega
May 6, 2008—Storage management software maker MonoSphere today announced a round of enhancements to its Storage Horizon capacity management product, including more features for VMware environments, a new automated chargeback capability, and analysis of storage consumed by databases, and added support for EMC Celerra and IBM disk arrays.
The new version of the company's flagship capacity management product, Storage Horizon 3.7, offers enhanced support for VMware server virtualization, helping storage teams understand to what extent and how rapidly applications running on guest operating systems are consuming storage at the array level.
Storage Horizon 3.7 visualizes storage abstractions and analyzes how VMware hosts are using storage, allowing IT departments to view storage usage details and the relationships between array LUNs, ESX servers, VMware file systems (VMFS), VMware virtual disks (VMDK), guest operating systems, and guest file systems or raw devices.
Frank Kettenstock, vice president of marketing at MonoSphere, says many storage teams have little visibility into what's happening in their storage environments. Add virtual servers to the mix, and the process of provisioning storage for applications becomes an arduous task.
"We're trying to demystify VMware storage environments by showing and understanding how VMware hosts are using storage resources," says Kettenstock. "Our new reports see all volume groups and the file systems that were created upon them. Storage teams have been telling us that server folks tend to horde storage. Now they can fight back."
Also new to Storage Horizon 3.7 is chargeback analysis. The software automates chargeback reporting with a new set of capabilities that allow users to group IT assets, both logical and physical, by business unit, department, application, hardware, or other parameters. The assets are then automatically analyzed to show costs of configured raw storage and actual array usage.
In addition, Storage Horizon 3.7 includes a series of pre-configured analytical reports that identify wasted, unused, and under-utilized storage assets. The reports are designed to ensure storage consumers use allocated storage efficiently.
Storage Horizon 3.7 includes features for analyzing storage consumption of Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and Sybase databases, as well as Microsoft Exchange. For Oracle databases, users can "drill down" into the database to see details and forecasts of its table spaces and data files and view log allocations. Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) allows Storage Horizon to recognize the single database across a cluster of hosts, as well as analyze, forecast, and report the database storage usage as a single database. For SQL and Sybase databases, drill-down reveals information on multiple databases to see data versus log information. Exchange users can drill down and see details of public folder rollups and mailbox rollups.
MonoSphere has also expanded array support in Storage Horizon. Version 3.7 provides support for IBM's System Storage DS and ESS series arrays and EMC's Celerra family of filers.
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