Similar to how siloed data storage strategies are losing their allure in the modern data center, FalconStor is combatting myopic management and monitoring approaches.

Organizations with multi-vendor storage environments are often forced to cobble together reports from an assortment of different storage arrays to generate a complete view of their heterogeneous setups, a complex, time-consuming process that can cause problems to fall through the cracks, said to Tim Sheets, vice president of global marketing for FalconStor. In response, the Melville, NY company today introduced FreeStor Analytics, a new feature in the company’s vendor-agnostic storage software platform that combines predictive analytics capabilities with data from the its Intelligent Abstraction storage virtualization technology to help administrators get ahead of performance or capacity issues and run a tighter ship overall.

Sheets readily admits that storage vendors “give you really good data points on their platforms.” What they often lack is context, he asserted. Of course, any visibility into the storage systems of competing vendors is minimal at best. “Silos are great for the farm, but inefficient for mixed or horizontal environments,” Sheets told InfoStor.

FreeStor Analytics provides both historical and predictive real-time analytics that stretches across an enterprise’s entire storage infrastructure, encompassing physical arrays, virtual storage or the cloud. Consolidated into a single dashboard, this data enables storage administrators to fine-tune their application performance optimization efforts, manage capacity and monitor the integrity of their data availability services.

In short, the new version of FreeStor fills the storage requirement of the software-defined data center puzzle. It enables enterprises and storage providers to “modernize and move forward, taking the hardware out of the equation,” said Sheets.

Along with the new analytics capabilities, FreeStor sports a new, user-friendly management interface with customizable dashboards. Administrators can access real-time performance statistics, inventory counts and views on the health of their systems that reach across entire, multi-site storage infrastructures from storage pools and virtual LUNs down to the physical disks, and every layer in between.

Now certified for SAP HANA, FreeStor also enables service-level monitoring, complete with proactive alerts with smart rules. “I don’t have to be a scripting guru,” assured Sheets. A REST application programming interface (API) paves the way for custom reporting, application monitoring and billing tools.

A new Cinder driver helps businesses more seamlessly integrate FreeStor into their OpenStack cloud environments. Finally, new iPhone and Android apps allow administrators to remotely monitor their storage environments.